“Wait,” Drake said, and the man stayed his hand. “Not this time. This time I need something else.”
The man frowned, which accentuated the deep grooves around his mouth.
“Drake, we had an arrangement.”
“I know, I know. Did you get the shot of Raul?”
He nodded.
“Good. Now, I know you aren’t going to like this—” Drake began, but was cut off momentarily by a groan. “—but, but, I need you to do some digging for me.”
“What kind of digging?”
“I need you to find an article… a newspaper article,” Drake began, trying not to be deliberately obtuse. “One that was never published.”
The man leaned back, and pulled his hand out of his jacket, the yellow envelope still tucked somewhere deep inside.
“Like on an Internet site? Drake, I’m—”
Drake shook his head.
“No, this is from a long time ago. Something that may or may not exist.”
If his contact could frown further, his lips would have slid right off his face.
“What are you talking about?”
“Before I tell you, you must promise that whatever you find, you won’t publish it.”
The man shifted uncomfortably.
“Drake, what the hell is this? We had an agreement. After the Skeleton King, you said in exchange for information about specific cases, I would pay you cash. That was it. That was our agreement.”
Drake took a sip of his coffee. It tasted like charred tar.
“I know. But this is different. This is something I don’t even know exists. But I need you to look in places that I can’t. If you do this, I’ll promise you the exclusive for the entire Butterfly Killer’s case when we catch the bastard.” He cringed at his own use of the moniker, but it had been intentional.
And it worked: the man’s expression transitioned from disgusted to interested with just those two words. And then, as Drake had predicted, he nodded.
“What do you need?”
“I need you to use your contacts at the Times and any other media outlets that you might have access to. I’m looking for anything from about twenty years ago—anything from, say, nineteen ninety to ninety-six—from New York City that involve the victims Neil, Chris, or Thomas. I’m also interested in news worthy reports regarding Deer Valley Academy, the students or their parents, including Kenneth Smith. And butterflies. Seriously, I—”
“Woah,” the man interrupted, “anything about butterflies? Anything?”
“Yes, anything. But here’s the rub: I don’t want articles that have been published. I already have a guy on that, and it looks to be a dead end. I want things that weren’t published. Do you catch my drift?”
“Like articles that have been redacted? Military memos? FBI? Because there’s—”
Drake shook his head.
“No, not military or FBI, nothing like that. We’re not talking Area 51 shit, just news articles that for some reason an old crusty editor decided at the last minute that, hey, we’re going with something else instead. Just like that, out of the blue. Maybe he wants the draft copies and the reporter notes, too. And maybe, just maybe, this editor starts pulling into the parking lot in a newer model car, or is suddenly obsessed with checking the time on his new Rolex, if you catch my drift.”
The man was nodding now, and Drake was glad that he didn’t have to spell it out for him.
“Twenty years ago? That’s going to be all paper. It’s going to take time, Drake. Some real grunt work.”
Drake sipped his coffee.
“So what? Get someone else to help you out. Two or three people, maybe. Interns. But this has to stay—” what did Simmons say? DL? —”on the DL.” The word seemed even stranger coming out of his mouth than Butterfly Killer.
The contact considered this and then stood with such suddenness that Drake instinctively pulled back.
“I’ll do it,” he said as he slid out of the booth. “But only this once, Drake. And it better be worth it.”
“It will,” Drake promised as the man turned and headed toward the door. “Trust me, it will.”
“I’ll send you an email when—if—I find something.”
Then the door chimed and he was gone.
Less than a second later, as if on cue, Broomhilda arrived at his side.
“Whiskey?” she asked.
Drake thought about this for a moment, before deciding against it.
“No, not this time. Just the bill.”
He wanted a drink. My god, did he ever. But he couldn’t.
He still had work to do tonight.
PART III - BUTTERFLY
~
CHAPTER 46
THE INTERIOR OF THE HOUSE was dark and the air was thick with the scent of unwashed bodies, the brooding aroma of sweat and urine.
“NYPD! Peter Kellington, step forward with your hands up!”
There was a staircase extending to their right and a narrow hallway on the left-hand side. Just inside the front entrance, and to Clay’s immediate right, was a closed door.
Clay turned to Drake, and then indicated the closed door with the barrel of his service revolver.
“Watch my six.”
Drake nodded back and moved a handful of steps into the house.
He heard Clay take several deep breaths, then he threw the door open, sweeping the gun from his left to his right. As his partner stepped into the room and started to clear it, Drake turned around, covering Clay’s now exposed back.
He pointed his gun halfway between the hallway and the stairs, and listened closely. Clay’s breathing was still audible despite being well inside the front room now, and Drake thought he heard something like a grandfather clock ticking somewhere deeper in the house. Other than that, he heard nothing.
There’s nobody here, he thought with an air of smugness. I told Clay this was a waste of time.
Drake was about to say as much to Clay, when something clattered across the floor. Roughly the size of a marble, it came from the direction of the front door and rolled awkwardly between his legs and down the hallway.
As he spun toward the front door, he caught sight of something small and white in his periphery, like an over-sized tooth, but he resisted the urge to focus on it.
Drake leveled his gun, lowering to one knee as he did.
“Drake?” Clay called.
He ignored his partner and scanned the doorway, and then the porch.
A flicker of opaque movement among the thinness of night and rain bounded down the porch steps and fled into the street.
“Hey!” Drake shouted, “Stop!”
But the man was quick and lithe, and after he leapt onto the patio stone walk, he seamlessly broke into a run.
“Stop!” Drake shouted again. He rose to his feet and started after him. In a second, he was outside, the rain pounding down on him. It ran down his forehead, blurring his vision. He swiped at it, trying to locate the shadow.
There.
The figure was already forty yards away, heading in the opposite direction of the oncoming sirens.
“Stop!” he screamed. He had taken two steps onto the porch when he heard a sound that would haunt him forever.
The crack of a single gunshot belched from the inside of the house like a thunderclap trapped in a cardboard box.
Drake whipped around, eyes wide, heart racing.
“Clay!” he cried, sprinting back inside.
There was a man standing halfway down the stairs, holding a still smoking pistol out in front of him.
Even in the darkness, Drake could see the man’s pale face liquid with shock.
Drake strode forward, aimed, and then fired.
The first bullet missed, the rain in Drake’s eyes blurring his vision. There was a dull thunk as the bullet embedded in the cheap plaster wall inches from the man’s left shoulder.
The sound of plaster exploding onto the stairs seemed to animate Peter Kellington, and he dropped t
he gun and swiveled.
He took a single step and then Drake fired again.
And again.
And again.
The seasoned Detective had missed with his first shot, but the next three hit their mark.
The first struck Peter in the torso, just above his left hip. The man grunted and spun in with the impact just as the second bullet shattered his left shoulder blade. The man started to fall backward down the stairs when the third bullet hit.
This final shot tore through the bottom of his skull where it met his spine, severing his brain stem and blowing out the front of his throat.
Peter Kellington’s body immediately went slack and he landed on his back and proceeded to slide down the stairs.
Drake didn’t need to look at him to know that he was dead. Only a dead body reacted this way.
Instead, he ran to the room, all the while shouting Clay’s name over and over again.
He found his partner lying on his back half in, half out of the room that he had been in the process of clearing when Peter had fired his only shot. Clay’s eyes were open, but they were vacant, cloudy. His breath was coming in short bursts, and there was a slight hiss and sizzle accompanying each one.
Drake dropped to his knees.
“Clay!” he screamed. “Please, God, no!”
He located a single bullet hole three or four inches below his collarbone on the left-hand side. Blood was bubbling out like some sort of volcanic spring.
“No! Stay with me Clay! Stay with me!”
He put pressure on the wound, but he knew that it was too late. The bullet had clipped one of his arteries, and his life was slowly simmering out of him.
Once again Drake’s vision was blurred, only this time it was from tears and not from the rain.
“No,” he moaned. “Pleeeease.”
He looked up at Clay’s face. The man coughed once, the saliva and blood that came forth coating his thick beard, then he went still.
Drake began to sob.
Without thinking about what he was doing, he threw his gun to one side, then reached down and tucked one arm under the man’s neck and the other under his legs. With a grunt, he picked his friend up and started toward the open door.
The rain was illuminated in a prism of red and blue, and the sound of police cars screeching to a halt filled the night air.
“No!” Drake screamed. “No!”
And then he fell onto one knee, lowering Clay’s dead body as he did, a single thought running through his mind.
It should have been me… it should have been me… it should have been me…
CHAPTER 47
“Wake up,” a voice said. “Drake, wake up.”
Drake grunted and opened his eyes. Startled, he looked at his arms, half expecting to see Clay’s bearded face nested in them, a caterpillar wriggling out of his slack mouth. But his arms were empty, his palms upturned as if summoning himself from sleep.
When he recognized the cream-colored seat, he slunk back down and stifled a groan.
“What’s with you and sleeping in my car all the time?” Chase asked in an obvious attempt to keep things light.
Drake worked his way deeper into the soft leather.
“It’s more comfortable than my couch,” he grumbled. He cleared his throat and said, “Was I talking again?”
“No,” Chase said. Her voice was even, but Drake got the impression that she was lying anyway.
He decided to leave it alone. No good could come from calling her on it, and it might even lead to her asking questions, and Drake had had enough of questions for one lifetime.
Drake turned his attention to the house across the street from where they had parked, which was nestled between seven or eight identical townhouses. It was completely dark. Even the light above the front door—motion sensor, he thought—was off.
Dark like Peter Kellington’s house had been.
He shuddered.
“Any movement?”
Chase shook her head.
“No. According to Detective Gainsford, Tim Jenkins arrived home at eight, turned the lights on in the kitchen then in what he assumed was the family room to watch TV. At half-past nine all lights went out.”
Drake nodded.
He reached onto the dash and grabbed the two stapled pieces of paper. As he scanned the first page, he said, “You really think that this is our guy? That Tim Jenkins is the killer?”
Chase shrugged.
“Don’t know. But he’s involved somehow, I can just feel it.”
Drake cocked his head at this, remembering the certainty by which Clay and the rest of the department had proclaimed that Peter Kellington, a half-wit janitor with three priors for peeking into the high school girl’s locker room, had been the Skeleton King.
Drake tried to explain that a pervert doesn’t go from peeping tom to serial killer mastermind overnight, the same way that you don’t go from fucking around playing street hockey after school to playing in the NHL, but they wouldn’t listen.
What had Clay said?
I know it’s him; I feel it in my bones.
Drake shook his head and changed the subject. The nightmares had left his waking hours for the time being.
It was best not to encourage a return.
“Hey, why do rich kids always use three names?” he asked.
Chase looked at him.
“What do you mean?”
Drake looked down at the report that Detective Yasiv had made on butterflies and read, even as he spoke about something else entirely.
“Neil Benjamin Pritchard… Thomas Alexander Smith…” Drake said absently.
“Everyone has a middle name.”
Drake looked up.
“Not everyone… but I get it, most people do. Still, only rich kids seem to use it regularly. What’s yours, by the way?”
Chase blushed.
“Edith.”
Drake chuckled.
“Edith? Jesus, are you an eighty-year-old woman from North Dakota?”
He had expected a laugh, but didn’t get one.
“It was my grandmother’s name,” Chase said, turning back to the house.
Drake went silent and returned his attention to the report. He had nearly completed the first page when Chase spoke up.
“What’s yours?”
“Hmm?”
“Your middle name? What’s yours?” Chase asked.
“Donald.”
“Donald?”
“Yep, Donald.”
“Damien Donald Drake? Triple D?”
Drake laughed again.
“Yep.”
“And you’re making fun of my name?”
Drake shrugged and scanned the interior of the BMW dramatically.
“Yeah, but I’m not rich, so I don’t use it, Chase Edith Adams.”
“Touché, my friend. Touché.”
Drake went back to reading.
“Hey, did you know that caterpillars can increase their body weight a thousand times in three months?”
“Really?”
Drake waved the paper.
“So Henry says. It’s all here. Out little Detective Yasiv seems to know a shit ton about butterflies—a wee budding entomologist is he.”
Her attention peaked, she asked him if there was anything else interesting in the report.
Drake shrugged.
“Define interesting… it’s all factoids about the life cycle of butterflies, from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.”
Chase looked over at him as he flipped to the last page.
“What’s that?” she asked, referring to the final paragraph that was separated by several blank lines.
Drake read the passage.
“Did you know that there’s a butterfly conservation just on the outskirts of NYC? Says here that they used to have an annual Monarch festival.”
“There are a bunch of butterfly gardens throughout the city, including Central park. I had a few uniforms check them out, b
ut they didn’t come up with anything.”
Drake read the passage again to himself.
“Yeah, but like this? Apparently, every year the butterfly conservation releases tens of thousands of Monarchs into the air. Used to be a big thing back in the nineties, not so much anymore.”
Chase turned her body sideways to look at him.
“Monarchs? Really? I wonder why this didn’t come up.”
“Maybe because it shut down six months ago. Lack of funding.”
“Shit, I’ll get Dunbar to check it out. Might be a trigger of sorts—an ex-employee, maybe. Disgruntled at losing his job, takes it out on rich folk who donate to everything but.”
Drake tilted his head. This theory seemed to have some weight to it, and warranted further investigation.
Did Thomas snub the conservation, somehow? Neil too? How might Chris be involved?
He was about to pose these questions, when Chase’s phone started to ring.
“Adams,” she said flatly after answering.
Drake watched as her brow progressively furrowed until it nearly buried her eyes.
“Really? You’re sure that the lawsuit was SSJ vs Jenkins?”
Drake sat bolt upright and Chase looked over at him, eyes bulging.
“Shit. And he used to manage the butterfly conservation before it went under six months ago?”
Another short pause and then Chase exhaled loudly. Drake was stupefied.
Chase’s theory didn’t just hold water, it was a goddamn river of a hypothesis.
“Alright, that’s enough for probable cause. We’re going to bring him in. Thanks Dunbar.”
Chase hung up and then started to adjust the pistol on her belt without saying anything.
“What?” Drake asked, his breath coming fast, his heart starting to thud. “What about SSJ? Jenkins and the conservation? Jesus, Chase, speak up!”
Chase reached for her door handle and then turned back, smiling smugly.
“Smith, Smith and Jackson were suing Tim Jenkins for some sort of wildlife violation.”
“What? Why is SSJ suing Jenkins? They do mergers and acquisition, commercial real estate. Now they’re vegan rights activists?”
Shadow Suspect Page 20
