by CJ Lyons
“Officially, we’re still not talking about her disease. She almost told me something earlier today, then all this shit with Littleton happened. But I have to tell you, I can’t take it much longer. I don’t want to add to her stress with what’s going on with Jacob, but—” He pivoted to the door, then back to her, hating his uncertainty. “Look, I’m not asking you to betray any confidences or mess with your doctor-patient relationship, but give me some advice here. As her friend. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I want to be there for her, want to help, but how can I when she won’t let me in?”
Damn, last thing he wanted was to sound like a whiny school kid with a crush. Rossi meant more to him than that. He just didn’t have the right words…couldn’t even begin to find them. Maybe they didn’t exist; maybe there were no words for what they had. All he knew was whatever they had, he didn’t want to lose it. Or her.
Louise seemed to understand. She stepped close to him, placed her palm on his arm in a motherly fashion, despite the fact that she was only a few years older than he was.
“I’ve known Angie for a long time. She’s always been a hard read. Even worse, there’s this rebel streak in her that won’t let her forgive herself for her father’s death, won’t let her be happy, so she’s always fighting. Herself more than anything else.”
“You’re saying I can’t win here? I should just walk away?”
“Would you?”
“No. No way in hell.” He wasn’t abandoning Rossi. He’d seen the way her family treated her. Even Jacob took her for granted, assumed she was so strong she didn’t need anything or anyone. He knew better. She was strong. It was the passion behind that strength that had drawn him to her. But she was also exquisitely vulnerable, even if she’d never admit it to anyone, including herself.
“Then there’s your answer. Just because Angie is driven to fight against happiness, to guard herself against pain and regret, that doesn’t mean she has to win.”
He straightened, feeling better. “Thanks, Louise.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“Exactly what I promised Rossi I’d do. I’m going to nail these bastards.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Angela sat in silence as Devon took the long way around to her place. He was glad he’d gone back to pick up the car after settling Ozzie in at the brownstone. He wasn’t sure she’d make it the ten blocks to Jimmy’s bar under her own steam.
“He’s going to die,” she said in a hushed voice low enough to be denied.
From what she’d told him about PXA comas, he wasn’t sure that was altogether bad. In fact, if it’d been someone he loved, he might consider taking matters into his own hands, if only to end their suffering. He glanced her way. She stared out the window, her back to him.
“Jacob knows how you feel about him.” It was a lie. Devon seldom lied, and never before to Angela. But the truth would only torture her. Jacob had become a friend, had shared his confusion about his ex-wife, his regret for their divorce. Said he was determined to win her back before it was too late.
Time. The greatest enemy, the ultimate victor. When he’d worked for the Russians, an Avtorityet in charge of their Bratva, or brigade, had told him that.
Angela’s shoulders slumped as she shook, her forehead braced against the window. Through everything they’d seen and done together, he’d never seen her cry, not like this, losing all control. He focused on the road ahead, unsure what to do, certain she wouldn’t appreciate any intercession. Like him, she was extremely private, hated being exposed as vulnerable.
The street in front of Jimmy’s Place was crowded with police vehicles and a crime-scene van. He parked around the corner and circled the car to open her door, something she usually would have never allowed him do. The dome light glowed black against the dried blood that smeared her white blouse and pale skin of her hands. He helped her up out of her seat and walked with her to the bar.
Jimmy had closed the place, a handwritten sign reading Family Emergency taped to the front door. A crowd gathered beyond the crime scene tape watching the techs bustling around the alley. Angela used her keys to open the door to the bar and they made their way up to her apartment unnoticed.
Her door was unlocked. “Wait here.” He drew his gun and quickly scouted the apartment, easy to do since the loft design left everything in the open except for the bathroom and a curtain drawn across the bedroom area. “Okay, it’s clear.”
She shambled in, her unsteady gait betraying her exhaustion. “You really think they’d come after me?”
“That guy in the alley said they wanted something from you.”
She looked up at the ceiling in despair. “I don’t have anything left.”
Her door was a standard interior door; cheap spring lock that he could bypass in less time than it’d take to knock twice. No peephole, chain, or deadbolt. “This the only lock you have? I’ve seen toilets with better privacy locks.”
“That’s all it’s there for,” she said, her tone approaching robotic. “Privacy. I wasn’t much worried about anything else. Jimmy takes care of the rest with the bar.”
“I’ll send a guy over in the morning.” He spotted the mounds of pills scattered over her dining table. Stepped on several, crushing them. “Good thing Ozzie’s not here. What if he ate these?”
“My mother. She loves her drama.” She joined him, running her fingers through the colorful pills and capsules, picking and choosing. She gulped several down dry.
“Sure you know what you’re doing with those?” Ryder would kill him if he let her overdose or do something stupid. And right now, he couldn’t trust her judgment. He steered her in the direction of the bathroom. “Why don’t you get cleaned up?”
Her gaze vacant, she nodded and stumbled into the bathroom. She left the door ajar, throwing her bloody clothes out, one piece at a time. “Burn those.”
The water started. He gathered the clothing, shoved it into a plastic shopping bag, and set the bag outside her door in the hall. Next, he swept up the pills from the floor, washed them down the disposal, and sorted the other pills into some semblance of order.
She was still in the shower and he’d moved on to gathering the rest of the trash—he’d never have guessed her to be such a slob—when his phone rang. Gena. “Did you find Eugene Littleton?” he asked without greeting her.
“He found me. Has some idea that going on record will keep him alive. The old if-you-kill-me, this-tape-will-be-released ploy.”
“That only works if he actually knows something.”
“Exactly. Which is why I suggested we meet at your favorite restaurant.”
“Perfect.” There was an entrance to the tunnels below the Lees’ kitchen. Once he had Eugene in private, he’d see exactly how much he knew about these brothers of his.
The water stopped. Angela emerged, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, her skin flushed from the shower. Or her illness. He’d noticed she tended to run a fever when she was stressed. And before she entered those crazy fugues of hers.
If Littleton wouldn’t talk, maybe he could persuade Angela to search his mind for the answers. They might need to dose Littleton with PXA to create the right kind of brain waves she could access. And from what she’d told him earlier when she refused to reach out to Daniel, even then it wouldn’t be easy. At least not for her.
But to find the animals who killed Tymara and all those others, it would be worth any pain. He’d just have to convince her of that.
“We’ll be there in twenty,” he told Gena and hung up. Then he turned to Angela. “Want a chance to talk to Eugene Littleton? Maybe get some answers about who those men are?”
She answered with a smile that reminded him of the Russian Kryshas, the brutal enforcers who knew no compassion.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It wasn’t Ryder’s case. Hell, technically, Ryder was a witness, therefore couldn’t touch this case with a Predator drone. What were they going to do? Demote
him? Again?
He left the ER and used his new passkey to enter the Advocacy Center down the hall. All he was doing was thinking. They couldn’t bust him for that, much as it seemed at times that they’d like to. He unlocked the door to his office—first time he’d had his own office; detectives usually worked out of a squad room—and entered.
The overhead fluorescent light revealed a space large enough for a desk, two tall file cabinets, and a round table that seated four. Two walls were covered with whiteboards; someone had drawn Welcome, Detective Ryder! in colorful letters.
The desk was like any institutional desk, the only personal touch a plate of cookies with a large red bow on top. An image from tonight’s crime scene flitted before him: an almost-empty plate of colorful holiday cookies right beside the shoebox holding all of the NA attendees’ cell phones. Thanks, but no, thanks. He slid the plate into the garbage can. Better paranoid than dead.
He turned to survey his new domain. Computer with dedicated access to both the hospital system and the police department, as well as state and federal databases. Nice. Could come in handy, but right now it was the whiteboards he needed.
He erased the welcome note and started jotting random thoughts. Facts he listed on the left, questions on the right.
Fact: Littleton did not kill Tymara. Question: Who did?
Fact: Littleton did rape Tymara. Question: Who else did?
Fact: Littleton did not poison the people at the school. Question: Did Sylvie Wysycki?
Fact: Littleton did not kill Wysycki. Question: Who did?
He stepped back. Not much help. Yet. He grabbed a different color and began scribbling random questions.
Who were Littleton’s partners? How did he contact them? How did they gain access to the school? All the people he’d seen walk in the front door were among the victims, so the killers had to be already waiting inside. Had they used the back entrance? If so, did they bribe someone to leave it open? How did they gain access to the security system? Did they work at the school? How did they know Wysycki? Why her? A random choice, or because she had access to drugs? Did they provide the drugs, or did she?
Another color. This time he focused on the crimes. Each scene felt personal; they knew the victims or, at the very least, wanted to see them suffer. There were voyeuristic and sadistic components to all the crimes, especially the PXA Jacob had been given after he’d already been beaten to a pulp. A coup de grace, knowing it was fatal and that he’d suffer until the minute he died.
He circled the word personal. Littleton or his partners had to be involved with their victims. How? Part of the NA group? Involved with Wysycki? Other cases with proxies?
That brought him up short. Before his transfer to the Advocacy Center last month, he’d worked Major Cases for years and had never seen or heard of a crime similar to this. Sure, he’d had suspects claim that someone else had done the crime or someone had made them do it, but never this weird power game of a group of men forcing someone else to act out a crime.
The level of commitment, coercion…hell, the risk. He could see it happening if they’d killed Littleton and Tymara with that first crime, but to let them both live for seven long months? It made no sense.
A third color. This time bright red. Was Tymara supposed to die seven months ago? If so, how did her not dying change things?
He read and reread his question. If Tymara had died, they’d have had nothing but a circumstantial case against Littleton. In fact, if anything, Littleton could argue that all the evidence against him—his prints, his DNA, his semen—pointed to a consensual sexual encounter. Why would he tie her up, duct-tape her mouth and eyes, and brutalize her after he’d already gotten what he wanted?
Not to mention the evidence that there was more than one perpetrator involved in the second assault. Evidence that came from Tymara’s recounting of the event and the size of the bruises left by their hands, not evidence that could actually identify the men. Which any good defense attorney would have also used, arguing that if Littleton was smart enough not to leave evidence during that second assault on Tymara, why didn’t he simply get rid of the evidence from his previous sexual encounter with her?
Soooo…Littleton had raped Tymara. They had her testimony that it was not consensual. Although if she had died, it would have boiled down to Littleton’s word alone. But had he called in a partner or partners for the second attack?
Or was he, like he said earlier at the jail, coerced into involving his partners, this Brotherhood? What blackmail threat was strong enough to keep a man silent during seven months of jail time? If his partners were that powerful, why not just kill him? The jail was overcrowded, easy enough to get to him inside. Or post his bail and take care of business once he was released.
Why all the drama? Littleton’s silence as they hammered at him to give up his partners. Tymara’s murder today.
And then there was tonight. Littleton leading Ryder to the school. Forcing him to act as his alibi witness. Thumbing his nose at Ryder and the criminal justice system like a petulant child.
Childish. That was the word. This didn’t feel like the intricate, masterfully plotted scheme Littleton had suggested. Seriously? A brotherhood of power players that preyed on lesser criminals?
He’d almost believed it. Except for two things. Any “brotherhood” that would allow Littleton, the blue-collar skivvy-pervert exterminator, to join its ranks would not be the rich, powerful, well-connected elite of Cambria City. And even if this Brotherhood did exist, why had their only crimes been a botched rape-attempted murder and then today’s headline-grabbing, well-orchestrated killings? If crimes had personalities, these were as different as night and day.
He stepped back from the board, rapping the marker against his teeth as his vision blurred the colors from both sides into a collage. Not a fraternity. A pair. One impulsive screw-up, Littleton. And one compulsive planner, able to patiently wait seven months and put all the moving pieces together.
They knew each other. More than that, they trusted each other.
If he was right, then who were the men who attacked Jacob? Thugs hired by Littleton or his OCD partner? What was the point after he’d already staged the massacre at the school? Could be the partner had a grudge against Jacob just like Littleton did.
Grudge. That word felt right. Petulant. Childish. Tit for tat. Winners, losers. Tag, you’re it.
A game.
He wrote the words, drew a bold box around them.
Players taking turns. First, Littleton’s impulses got the best of him and he attacked Tymara, called his partner to help clean up the mess, and together they’d attacked Tymara again, the game’s opening move. Only they’d screwed up, leaving Tymara alive to go to the cops.
Then his partner had to wait until Littleton was freed for his turn. He’d helped things along by killing Tymara.
Were they keeping score? Ryder couldn’t bring himself to write the odious question on the board. Instead, he kept following the emotional entanglement, trying to make sense of the chaos.
Littleton had chosen Tymara. Which meant Wysycki had also been handpicked. Her role in the school massacre was designed to torment her in the worst way possible, to degrade not only her life but her memory after she was killed.
Torment. Pain. Stripping her of control.
He grabbed his phone and dialed the ME. “Any results on the tox screen for Sylvie Wysycki?”
“Just preliminary. Final will take two to three weeks.”
“What did it show?”
“Scopolamine, Rohypnol, and PXA, same as her victims.”
“Maybe they weren’t her victims.” Ryder hung up. These actors wanted to take credit. That’s why they hadn’t been content to allow Wysycki die like the others. She’d been the true target—he needed to find out why.
Rossi’s theory felt right. Someone had been there, in the room, watched the poison take effect, given the orders for the victims to rip off their own faces—probably after Wysycki ha
d been isolated and restrained, forced to watch, powerless to do anything, writhing in pain. And once they knew there was little to no hope of anyone surviving, they’d finished Wysycki by slicing her throat and firing the shot designed to bring Ryder running.
Wysycki’s name would forever be associated with the poisonings, tabloid headlines, doomed to become an urban legend.
Worse than humiliation.
Tymara’s rape and murder had the same feeling of overkill. Personal.
He spun to the computer on his desk, not bothering with the chair. If they were that close, odds were Mr. No-Name Brother-In-Crime would be in the system, linked to Littleton. Known associate, arrested together. Someway, somehow, there’d be a trace. More than that, there’d be a path connecting Mr. No-Name with Wysycki, just as there was a connection between Littleton and Tymara.
Now all he had to do was find it.
Chapter Thirty
Devon drove us over to the restaurant the Lees managed for Kingston Enterprises. I thought of their grandson and the other sick kids from the Tower. It seemed like ages ago that I’d met them, but it’d only been a few hours. “I can go with you to the clinic, help sort things out with Louise,” I offered.
“That would be helpful. A lot of these parents are uncomfortable with authority figures.”
I’d noticed that tonight, but they trusted Devon, opened up with him there. He was younger than most of them, yet they treated him with the reverence of a father figure.
“We’ll meet at the clinic at eight o’clock,” he said.
“There’s no way I can get you an appointment that soon.” I was thinking maybe I could convince Louise to give up her lunch—or Tommaso’s.
He said nothing, simply raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Who said anything about an appointment? I show up with a dozen kids, their distraught parents, and the Kingston checkbook, who’s going to do a damn thing about it?” His grin flashed in the headlights of oncoming traffic. “I never much cared about money before, but have to admit, it’s kind of fun always getting what you want just because of your father’s name.”
