“No!” he shouted at the secretary, who recoiled as if she had been struck. “Not Jenkins’s house! Tell them to get to the Butterfly Gardens! Can you remember that?”
Drake was running toward the front door as he spoke.
“Can you remember that? Can you remember!” he cried as he jammed his palm into the door and thrust it open.
He thought he saw the woman nod, but couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter, anyway.
By the time the cops got there, it would be too late.
It was up to him now. It was up to him to save his partner.
Drake sprinted through the night, threw the container of butterflies on the passenger seat, and then sped out of the parking lot.
CHAPTER 79
With the police cherry on his dash illuminating the night in blue and red hues, Drake’s rusty Crown Vic sped across the city. He didn’t know exactly where the Butterfly Gardens were, but he had a vague idea based on Detective Yasiv’s notes. And less than half an hour later, he located the first road sign directing him to the Gardens. Scheduled for destruction or not, the wheels of Road Bureaucracy turned slowly in NYC, and the signs gave no impression that the Gardens were closed.
When he got close, Drake switched the cherry off, and slowed to a crawl. The front gate leading to the parking lot was bent backward just far enough for him to weave his car through all the while staring at the looming geodesic dome in front of him. The moon was full and bright, and its blue rays reflected off the gray surface of the Butterfly Gardens with such intensity that it almost seemed to glow.
Drake shut off his headlights next, and then cut the engine entirely. One of the perks of such an old car, was that he could coast in neutral even with the engine off.
And that’s what he did now. The large parking lot was mostly empty, save a series of bulldozers haphazardly parked and a small corrugated storage container off to one side. But as he neared the front doors to the Gardens, he spotted a car tucked within the shadow of the dome.
It was a black, or maybe navy blue, BMW.
Drake’s heart sunk.
She was here. And the only reason she would be here was because he had brought her here.
An image of Chase Adams on her stomach, hands and feet bound behind her, her throat swollen closed, that awful butterfly scrawl on her back flashed in his mind.
No, he thought with such veracity that his teeth snapped closed with an audible snap. I won’t lose another partner.
He grabbed the gun that Chase had given him from the glove box, then hooked his other hand through the handle on the butterfly box.
As quietly as possible, Drake left his car, and made his way toward the entrance to the Butterfly Gardens.
Like the gate by the front of the parking lot, this door was partly open; someone had pried the flimsy lock off and it lay broken on the sidewalk.
Drake silently slipped inside, moving quickly away from the entrance, pressing his back against a wall bathed in shadows.
And then he waited; waited and listened.
The layout to the Butterfly Gardens appeared simple enough, the nature of which Drake had even guessed from the images on the signs leading up to it: a narrow hallway flanked on either side by washrooms, a cafeteria, and gift shops extending away from the entrance before it blossomed into a giant geodesic dome.
And that’s where they’ll be, he thought. Marcus would take Chase to the location that he had been brought by those damn kids all those years ago.
The spot where he had collapsed into a coma.
Drake waited until he caught his breath, then started to strafe along the wall toward the dome.
He had only taken half a dozen steps when something brushed against his foot and he kicked at it instinctively. A rat hissed and then skittered away, and Drake cursed himself for being so careless. The only thing he had going for him now was surprise. And if Dr. Kruk’s secretary did as bid, then the night would soon be alive with sirens.
Moonlight couldn’t penetrate the dark hallway, but ahead, where it opened to the dome, Drake could see shards of light illuminating the area in swashes of gray and blue.
He took ten steps, then twenty.
Thirty.
And then he stopped, trying to calm his breathing.
He heard a voice.
It was a man’s voice, or maybe a child’s; it was difficult to tell as the sound funneled down the hallway to him.
“You are going to give me a kiss, just like Mommy did.”
A chill shot up Drake’s spine as the image of Martha Slasinsky, propped on her chair, wrists ragged flashed in his mind.
“You are going to give me a kiss, pretty lady.”
Drake picked up the pace, moving quickly now, sacrificing silence for speed. He paused only when he got to the mouth of the hallway.
The dome opened before him as he expected, but what Drake wasn’t prepared for was the vegetation. It appeared gray in the moonlight, but he thought that it might very well be the same color by the noonday sun. Leaves of massive plants in various states of decay nearly blocked his passage.
Drake slunk low, using the decomposing foliage to hide his form as he moved toward the voice.
It didn’t take long before he saw them. For a moment, he simply stood there, ramrod straight, not believing his eyes.
Chase was in the center of the dome, standing on some sort of platform, her arms pulled behind her and tied around a pole that ascended all the way to the metal triangles that made up the dome high above.
There was a rag in her mouth, and her eyes were wide.
A man stood beside her, his back to Drake. It was Dr. Kruk as he remembered him from the day in his office: tall, lean, with thin neck and spindly arms.
Only it wasn’t.
The man’s posture was different. No longer was he adroit, giving off a sense of professionalism, of authority. Now, his arms hung low at his sides, dangling almost.
He looked as he had in the yearbook photograph, which had captured him half in and half out of the frame.
The single photograph that Ken Smith had missed.
Chase blinked once, twice, and then her eyes seemed to focus on him. When recognition washed over her features, Drake realized that he was still standing in the open. Without thinking, he dove to his left, landing softly on a several broad leaves that turned to dust as he fell.
It was almost a perfect landing—a perfectly silent landing. And it would have been, too, if not for the butterfly case.
One of the corners clinked off an area of exposed ground and instantly filled the air with the unmistakable sound of cracking glass.
Drake ducked his head beneath some half-dead shrubs just as Dr. Kruk whipped around.
“Who’s there?” the man cried.
Drake cursed silently, trying to figure out the best course of action.
In the end, it was Dr. Kruk who pressed his hand.
“I’ve got a gun, and I will kill this woman,” he said flatly.
And there it was, the cool air of professionalism that had been missing in his stature.
Drake swallowed hard before tucking Chase’s spare gun into his rear waistband and slowly pushing himself to his feet.
CHAPTER 80
“Marcus, it’s me,” Drake said holding his hands out to his sides to show that he was unarmed. “It’s Detective Drake.”
Marcus Slasinsky had slipped behind Chase and peered over her shoulder at him, a gun aimed at her temple. He didn’t think that his partner’s eyes could possibly grow any wider, but it seemed that they did, until the whites on either side of her hazel irises glistened in the moonlight.
“Ah, Detective Drake. I thought I might be seeing you again,” he shrugged. “Actually, I thought that I might meet up with you sooner. Did you come for your gun or the girl?”
Drake squinted hard, trying to focus on the gun. It was hard to tell at his distance, but it could very well have been his.
“You stole it from my car?”
Drake shook his head.
“You made them pay. All of them—they’re all dead now. You killed them all: Chris, Thomas, Neil, and Tim. It was… it was terrible what they did to you. But Chase—Detective Adams—she hasn’t done anything. She doesn’t deserve this.”
The man shook his head, and he seemed to get younger as he did. He moved away from Chase and grabbed the sides of his head with both hands, including the one clutching what Drake now recognized as his service pistol.
“You don’t understand… they brought me here and the… and the butterflies… they were everywhere—all around. And then they started crying—mocking me. I can’t stand the crying.”
And then Drake saw that the man—a boy now, eight years old again living with his rotting mother’s corpse—was the one with tears on his cheeks.
“It’s over, Marcus. It’s all over.”
Marcus sniffed and then laughed.
“I forgot all about it… years in psychiatric care made me forget. First about Mommy, then about what those bastards did to me. But… but when Thomas and his wife…” his sentence trailed off and he stared upward, gazing at the moon.
“It was a ploy, Marcus. Don’t you see that? You were set up—it was no accident that Thomas came to you. New York City is a fucked up place, with a lot of fucked up people. There must be a thousand psychiatrists… what are the odds that they came to you?”
Drake let his words sink in for a moment, watching as Marcus’s face contorted, flicking from the rational mind of the psychiatrist to that of an abused and confused young boy.
“It was no accident,” he continued, more softly this time. “It was Ken Smith, the man who gave you the money to go away after his son put you in a coma, the man who gave you the means to change your name, to get psychiatric help not only to change who you are, but who you were. And when it suited him, he brought Marcus back, didn’t he? Ken Smith is responsible for the death of his son, for the deaths of the other boys, not you.”
The man growled and he leveled the gun at Chase again.
“Woah, easy Marcus. Chase hasn’t done anything to you.”
The man shook his head, and his face twisted into a grimace.
“No, no, she didn’t. But she kind of looks like mommy, doesn’t she?” He smiled at her when he said this, and Chase moved as far away from him as she could given the way she was tied. “Yes, I kind of think she does. And I want mommy to give me a kiss again, to give me—”
“Butterfly kisses?” Drake finished for him.
Marcus pulled away from Chase, his brow furrowing in confusion.
“You—how—” then his face relaxed. “You found my notes, didn’t you?”
Drake nodded. A flash of color danced in his periphery, reminding him of the butterfly container that he had dropped and nearly smashed. He inched his foot closer to it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Marcus said, shaking his head again. He slid a container from his pocket, something clear that the moonlight shot through—save a thick, wriggling black shape. “There is only one thing left to do.”
Marcus reached over and pulled the rag from Chase’s mouth. She gasped, sucking in a huge lungful of air. And then he started unscrewing the cap with one hand.
Drake suddenly realized what the man was going to do, and it made him sick to his stomach. It wasn’t just the caterpillar—it was the fact that Martha Slasinksy had been dead when she had given her son the Butterfly Kiss, the one that had made what he had done all okay.
The one act that proved to Marcus that his mother loved him after all.
As if on cue, Marcus popped the top of the container off. Chase’s eyes locked on the wriggling caterpillar, her lips mumbling no, no, no, no repeatedly. She didn’t see Marcus’s other hand, the one with the gun that slowly rose toward the back of her head.
Drake didn’t think, he just acted. His right foot shot out, colliding with the flat side of the butterfly case. The sound of cracking and then shattering glass drew Marcus’s attention and he spun in his direction.
Drake remained completely still, arms still out, hoping that he had smashed the case this time. When no butterflies fluttered in front of him, however, his heart sunk.
“Please, Marcus. She’s done nothing to you. Let—”
And then, just as he was about to give up hope, a flutter of movement caught his eye.
A butterfly lazily took flight, it’s wings unfurling as if they had been damp and only now started to dry.
“Wha—” Marcus started, but as he noticed the butterfly, he gasped and stumbled backward.
And then, in an instant, two dozen butterflies were suddenly airborne, the moonlight changing their orange wings into shimmering shades of blue.
Marcus screamed, and when that sound faded, Drake heard something else.
The sound of Chase crying.
Drake didn’t hesitate, he reached behind him, pulled the pistol from his belt and then strode forward, firing two shots in rapid succession.
The first bullet missed, tearing through the foliage behind both Marcus and Chase.
The second, however, struck Marcus in the side, just above his left hip. The force of the impact sent him reeling, the pistol— Drake’s pistol—flying from his hand.
He went down, hard, a cry of his own on his lips.
Drake sprinted forward, ignoring Chase’s moans. In a matter of seconds, he was hovering over Marcus’s fallen body.
The man’s mouth was open, his eyes rolled back in his head. The caterpillar and the gun were gone, and he was holding his side. Blood leaked through his thin fingers.
“Just make the crying stop,” Marcus sobbed, in a high-pitched voice. “Please, just make it stop forever.”
For a brief moment, Drake felt sorry for him.
Beaten by his father, forced to live with his dead mother’s corpse for nearly a month. And if that wasn’t enough, tormented by bullies to such a degree that he had fallen into a coma.
But then Drake remembered his partner, Clay, and the way he had been murdered.
That was someone who deserved pity. Not this man. This man was a cold-blooded killer.
Drake straddled Marcus Slasinksy.
“You killed my partner,” he hissed.
Marcus’s eyes flipped forward, and they were boy’s eyes again, eyes that had seen torment and horror well beyond their eight years.
“You killed my partner,” Drake said again, this time more forcefully. “You killed my fucking partner!”
He raised the gun and aimed it directly at Marcus’s face.
“You—”
“I’m not dead!” Chase screamed from somewhere behind him. “I’m not dead, Drake! I’m right here! I’m right here! Please!”
Drake ground his teeth and drowned her out.
“You killed my partner,” Drake said again, only this time his voice was low, almost a whisper. “You killed Clay.”
And then he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 81
Drake watched from the audience as Detective Chase Adams slid in behind the array of microphones sporting the same white blouse that she had been wearing when she had addressed the media a few days prior.
“Good morning,” Chase began. Drake thought that she looked pretty good, given what she had been through and how little sleep—next to zero—she had gotten. “It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the loss of another one of our own: last night, Tim Jenkins, thirty-eight years of age, was murdered by the same man who took Thomas Smith, Neil Pritchard, and now we are fairly certain a Montreal restaurateur Chris Papadopoulos from us.”
Drake had to smile; after all this time, Chase finally got his name right. His smile faded when a reporter in the audience, a man standing directly beside Drake called out.
“Is the Butterfly Killer dead?”
C
hase held up a hand as if to say, one moment please, and then continued.
“Although we continue to mourn the loss of good men, of true New Yorkers, we will also sleep a little easier tonight knowing that their murderer has been apprehended.”
A small cheer, demure, but audible, rippled through the crowd.
Chase held up a hand again, and this time Drake thought he could make out red marks on her wrist from where Marcus Slasinsky had bound her.
“Is he dead? There are rumors that he was shot,” someone yelled.
This was followed quickly by more shouts.
“Who was he? What’s his name? What link does he have with the victims?”
Chase shook her head.
“During the apprehension of the suspect, the suspect, Dr. Mark Kruk, nee Marcus Slasinsky, was shot and is now being treated in critical care. He is, however, expected to survive.”
“Was Dr. Kruk Thomas Smith’s psychiatrist?” someone yelled, and this seemed to stun Chase for a moment. But she quickly regained her composure.
“That will be all for now,” the crowd groaned, but Chase pressed on. “I want to thank the city of New York, its proud citizens, and NYPD’s finest for all their hard work in putting an end to the short but violent bout of terror inflicted on our beautiful City. Thank you all.”
With that, she turned and left the podium, Sergeant Rhodes at her heels.
Drake started to disperse with the crowd, to head toward the entrance of 62nd precinct, when his eyes met those of a man with dark brown hair and thick grooves around his mouth.
Ivan Meitzer nodded at him, and Drake bowed his head and hurried toward the station.
~
Drake rubbed his fingers over the relief pattern on his detective badge, feeling solace in the texture, the familiar pattern of the shield, of the letters.
He would miss it, of that he was certain. But it was also his only choice.
A chance to start over.
The door opened behind him, and he slipped the badge into his pocket.
“Detective Drake,” Sergeant Rhodes said flatly as he crossed behind him and then took a seat at his desk.
Neither man said anything for several moments, both eying each other up, as if waiting for the other to crack.
Shadow Suspect Page 29
