HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by T. J. Brearton

  He kicked and fought, struggling to break Lawless’s hold. Lawless was a big man, and the motorcyclist was only a buck-forty, a buck-fifty, tops. Brendan thought the kid looked like some actor, good looking, with hay-straw blond hair. But he was strong, and put up a good fight. Lawless worked hard to wrestle him away from the door. He got himself behind the kid and started dragging. The kid dug in his boot heels – they left tracks in the dirt.

  Bostrom reached the fracas before Brendan, and threw himself into the struggle, helping Lawless get the kid under control. Brendan knew the motorcyclist just wanted to see the girl in that room, but the officers had no choice except to restrain him.

  The two deputies managed to get him on the ground, face down. Bostrom had a knee on the motorcyclist’s back.

  “Calm down.” Bostrom was out of breath, his face flushed.

  Brendan’s own face was dripping with sweat. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The day was damn hot.

  The kid kicked on the ground. He tried to roll out of the hold. He rocked back and forth, back and forth, looking to throw Bostrom off-balance. He was yelling and grunting, like a wild animal. His breath raised little clouds of dirt. His spit darkened the dry earth.

  “Okay,” said Brendan in a plaintive voice. “Okay, okay . . .”

  Bostrom’s head snapped up at the detective. Brendan had heard that Mike Bostrom had a temper.

  “What? You want me to let him go? Say the word, Healy, and I’ll let him run around like a pinball in your crime scene. Fuck it up even more than I did.”

  “No,” said Brendan. “No, I just . . .” There was nothing to say. He felt momentarily helpless.

  “Stop it!” Bostrom yelled down at the kid. “Stop it or you’re going to regret it!”

  Brendan stood looking down at the kid. He was afraid Bostrom was going to put him in a choke, the way the motorcyclist was fighting. Things were getting out of control.

  Brendan dropped down into a crouch, and then bent over so that his head was almost touching the ground. He looked into the motorcyclist’s wide, panicked eyes.

  “She’s dead,” he said, loud and firm. “Rebecca is dead. She was stabbed repeatedly, fatally, just one hour ago. Her killer could be still on the property. He could be in the next town, having a coffee. Okay?”

  It worked. It took a moment, but Brendan saw that the motorcyclist was growing still. He was listening.

  “Now, I don’t know who you are, but you obviously know the woman inside. You know Rebecca. You love Rebecca. But I can’t let you in there right now.”

  The motorcyclist started to struggle again. Bostrom cinched his grip tighter, drove his knee in deeper. He glanced up at Brendan, as if challenging him to contradict the deputy’s use of force again. Brendan ignored it. While the kid kept fighting, Brendan resumed talking. He used a softer voice.

  “You need to keep calm. I need you to help me, okay? I promise you will be able to see Rebecca. In just a few minutes. I promise. But right now, I can’t let you in there.”

  Everything seemed to have grown quieter. The motorcyclist was no longer resisting. Brendan briefly glanced across the big yard and saw that Investigator Delaney and another deputy – Watts – were looking over, watching. He raised a hand, indicating everything was okay. They left the old farmer in the cut-off shirt and headed over anyway.

  Brendan returned his attention to what was at hand. There was a still a ways to go to get the overwrought kid under control.

  “Now, Deputy Bostrom here is going to slowly take his weight off of you. We’re going to help you up. Are you ready?”

  Brendan gave it another moment. They waited in the suffocating heat. Brendan wished for a breeze, anything. What a morning. One for the books.

  “Okay,” came the muffled reply of the face-down kid.

  “Okay,” said Brendan. He looked at Bostrom again, and gave a nod. Bostrom’s face was contorted with frustration, but he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He slowly took his knee off the kid. Brendan helped Bostrom get the motorcyclist to his feet.

  The kid’s face was covered in dirt. Tears and spittle from his mouth tracked clean rivulets down his face. His black jacket had a huge splotch of yard dirt smeared across the front, his blue jeans were dusted with it too. His hair was a mess, and strands clung to his forehead.

  Brendan looked into the kid’s eyes. Then he broke eye contact and stepped over to Lawless.

  Brendan whispered to him, “What the hell is taking Clark so long up there? Dead is dead, last I checked. Let’s get the on-call mortuary service right here, right now. Can you do that for me? Go up there and tell Clark to get moving, please.” He added, “Thank you, Deputy.”

  Deputy Lawless stepped back and gave Brendan an evaluating look. Brendan knew what they’d all been thinking; he was some rookie detective, not from around here. They thought he was a bit of coffee house bullshit, that he probably considered himself hot stuff, a city boy in the country.

  Deputy Lawless tossed Brendan a wink. Then he nodded and turned and went in the house to do as Brendan had instructed.

  * * *

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kevin.”

  “Kevin? Okay, Kevin. What’s your last name?”

  The kid’s eyes, bloodshot and ringed with dust, locked on Brendan Healy.

  “Heilshorn.”

  “So you’re related to the victim. To Rebecca.”

  Those same eyes of the kid now welled with tears. “She’s my sister,” he said. “She’s my older sister.” The tears spilled, cleaving fresh, clean tracks down his dirty face. His lower lip trembled.

  They were sitting back in the grass, halfway between the house and the road. Kevin Heilshorn was on his rear end, facing the house. Brendan had arranged them this way.

  Brendan crouched in front of him, but not blocking that view. He observed the kid carefully. He noted where the kid looked: mostly at the house, and occasionally over to the shed.

  “So,” Brendan proceeded cautiously, “If you didn’t get a call from anyone . . .”

  “I was on my way here to see Rebecca,” Kevin said abruptly. “No. Nobody called me. We had a ten o’clock meeting.”

  A meeting, thought Brendan. It was an interesting way of describing a visit to a family member living out in a country farmhouse.

  Brendan glanced around. Delaney had gone back inside. Brendan had assured the senior investigator that he would be able to take care of this newcomer on the scene. It was, he reminded Delaney, what he was here to do. Delaney didn’t like talking to people, and never questioned the witnesses. Delaney supposedly was a good cop and excellent investigator, but he was a little bit prima donna, Brendan thought, and seemed to think he was above talking to witnesses or bystanders.

  Brendan thought that the unspoken truth was that Delaney had never had any training in proper interview techniques. He was old school, from the era when detectives mostly used intimidation to get information out of people.

  “Okay,” said Brendan. He decided it was time to get out his notebook. Usually he tried to keep the notebook out of any sort of questioning or interview, because it put a distance between him and the person he was talking to. They might feel reduced to a series of quotes, or he might miss something their body language told him. He didn’t need to jot down the word “meeting,” but he made a note to check the shed.

  He proceeded with a few standard questions. The kid was twenty-five, and the motorcycle was registered in his name. He was close in age to the victim – only two and a half years separating them. His address was Scarsdale, New York.

  “Did you drive the bike all the way up? That’s a long haul. You couldn’t have; not this morning.”

  “No, not this morning. I stayed in a hotel last night.”

  “You stayed in a hotel? Where?”

  “In Remsen.”

  Brendan looked off down the road, Route 12. Remsen was five miles south. He looked back at Kevin, whose eyes remained fixed on the house
. “You didn’t just come straight here? Why stay in a motel?”

  Kevin shrugged. Brendan thought he wasn’t going to say anymore, when the kid added, “Our meeting wasn’t until nine.”

  “What was your meeting about?”

  Kevin closed his eyes. He reached up, and wiped his dirty leather sleeve across his face, smearing tears and dirt. Then he took his fingers and pressed them to the closed lids of his eyes. He sniffled. “It was just a meeting,” he said. “We had some stuff to go over.”

  “Like what?”

  He pulled his hands away and his eyes popped open. He gave Brendan a hard look. “Like personal stuff, okay? Private stuff.”

  “Okay,” said Brendan softly. “But when you say ‘meeting,’ it makes me think business.”

  “Well, that’s how it is. You wouldn’t understand, man. I can’t . . . fuck.” He closed his eyes tight and started to cry.

  “I want to understand. Can you help me understand?”

  Kevin covered his face in his arms and shook his head.

  Brendan was considering whether to let the point go or give it a second and keep pressing, when a vehicle on Route 12 slowed and turned down the driveway, crunching the dirt and small stones. It was a black SUV. The on-call mortuary service.

  Kevin lifted his head and opened his eyes. “Is that them?” he said standing up.

  Brendan stood up too. They watched as the vehicle parked and a man and woman got out. They opened the back doors and unloaded a stretcher.

  Kevin abruptly started walking towards the house. “I’m going to see her now. I’m going to see my sister.”

  CHAPTER FOUR / THURSDAY, 10:13 AM

  State Troopers had arrived, along with more deputies from the next county, St. Lawrence. They had briefly organized and then spread out, heading off in all directions. Healy saw two troopers cutting a path through the corn, across the road where the farmer had been shooting an interloping rodent. It was almost ten o’clock. Healy doubted they would find anything, but it couldn’t be known whether the killer was hiding in the fields, or even on the premises. He could be in that big barn out back, or in that shed with the wide door, tucked away in the dark, waiting them out.

  The body of the young woman was brought out the front door. She had been zipped in a black bag. Healy stood next to the young man in the motorcycle jacket, Kevin. The man and woman from the mortuary service gently lifted the stretcher over the threshold and the step, into the dooryard. The black-bagged body wobbled a little.

  Kevin Heilshorn reached out, perhaps to touch the body, or to unzip it, and Brendan took hold of his arm gingerly, but firmly. Kevin relented. They walked alongside the gurney as it was trucked over to the SUV hearse.

  “Where does she go now?” The young man’s voice sounded choked.

  “She’ll go to the morgue,” said Brendan. “She’ll be looked after; she’ll be fine.”

  “Are they going to . . . cut her open? Do all that stuff?” His voice broke on the last word, and he sobbed as he walked, swaying a little.

  “No. There’s no reason for that. She’ll be examined. They’ll want to take a close look at her wounds. See if she has any . . . other signs that can help us.” A serology check. Blood from her killer. Semen. Detective Healy didn’t say these things.

  Stanley Clark, the coroner, came out of the house. As the man and woman loaded the body into the vehicle, Clark approached. Brendan kept an eye on Kevin, but stepped away to have a private word with Clark. Delaney had left the scene a few minutes before, coordinating the area search with the state police and two groups of deputies.

  Brendan raised his eyebrows, and Clark gave a brief report. “She has thirteen stab wounds. She has some petechial papules around her mouth and eyes. This could mean she was held down by her throat, and there was some strangulation. Or, it could be some type of pre-existing vasculitis. I won’t know until I can perform the autopsy.”

  Brendan made a clucking sound with his tongue. In a low voice head said, “I just told her brother that wouldn’t be necessary.”

  Clark looked at Brendan impassively. He seemed to regard the detective like some other life-form, one unfamiliar with indigenous customs. “Why would you do that?”

  “I was trying to comfort him.”

  The body was loaded into the hearse and the doors were closed. The man paused to offer condolences to Kevin, who himself looked like someone adrift in a foreign land. Brendan and Clark both looked at the young man, who was out of earshot. Still, they kept their voices low.

  Clark asked Healy: “Is he going to call the rest of the family?”

  “I’ll help him do it.” Brendan cut his eyes back to Clark. “What do you think happened in there?”

  Clark looked grim. “I think she was forced into the bed. There are also signs of blunt trauma to the head and left shoulder. She was stabbed repeatedly and succumbed. She’s dead.”

  “Thank you.”

  Clark offered a bird-like nod and swiftly moved away.

  Brendan stood for a moment. He had called the District Attorney’s office back. He had delegated two deputies to locate the next door neighbors and ferret out any witnesses, a car coming or going, strange noises, screams, anything. It was quiet out here in the country, Brendan thought, you could hear someone crack an egg a mile away when there was no traffic on the road. Route 12 was not a major artery, but nor was it a back road. A fair amount of vehicles had passed since he’d arrived on the scene, many of them slowing to get a look at the activity.

  Much of his to-do list would need to be delegated or accomplished back at the station. Finding out who owned the house, if not the victim, establishing a timeline, collating all the information he now had, and consulting with Clark once he had done his examination. He needed to check the victim’s phone, and look into all calls from within the past 24 hours, starting this morning and working his way back. Maybe even further back, if need be.

  First, though, there were things left to do on the scene. Brendan decided that Kevin Heilshorn shouldn’t be left alone for the time being. Kevin could also furnish Brendan with more information – whether his sister had a boyfriend, who her friends were, and above all, who else may have been invited to this “meeting,” that Kevin spoke of.

  However, one thing immediately didn’t wash about the meeting. The victim herself had called 911 and reported an intruder. If she had been expecting her brother, it would stand to reason that hearing a noise downstairs wouldn’t have caused her emergency call. She must’ve seen who’d entered the house, and either didn’t recognize him, or didn’t want him there.

  Brendan’s hunch suggested the latter. He couldn’t swallow the idea of a robbery, right off the bat. For one thing, the way those drawers were arranged. Still, he needed to ascertain what, if anything, had been stolen.

  And there was Bostrom to talk to. Delaney had been brusque with Bostrom, but Brendan wanted to know every detail about the deputy’s arrival on scene and his actions step-by-step.

  And finally, Brendan needed to venture back upstairs to the core scene, and see where the CSI unit was at, and what else they may have turned up.

  Delaney, it seemed, had cut him loose. Brendan felt that sense of unease returning. Not because the senior investigator had basically left him on his own, but for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of yet.

  He watched the mortuary service do a three-point turn in the driveway, and then head off down the driveway. Clark followed them in his sedan. The two vehicles turned on to Route 12 and headed south, towards Remsen.

  Kevin Heilshorn stood in the settling dust. Deputy Bostrom had remained at the house, as per Brendan’s instructions. He was off in the sprawling front yard, talking on his cell phone and pacing. Brendan felt that the scuffle with Kevin had unnerved the deputy. That or the fact Brendan had asked him to stay behind and not join the area search.

  At last, Brendan looked up at the sky. He didn’t think the area search would yield anything significant. The killer, he now felt
certain, was long gone.

  Brendan twisted his neck and his eyes fell on the bedroom windows where the victim had been found. The killer had made quick work of her. He’d entered the house, which was either open, or maybe he had a key. Rebecca Heilshorn had been getting out of the shower. He imagined her toweling her hair, another towel wrapped around her torso. She’d started down the hallway back to the bedroom where she’d get dressed and ready for this meeting with her brother. Along the way, she hears someone downstairs. The railing along the hallway overlooked the front door. Anyone standing there would be in plain view. So she gets an eyeful, and then runs to the bedroom where she dials 911.

  Brendan glanced at Kevin, and then at Bostrom. Bostrom was preoccupied. Kevin was looking around, apparently in a bit of a fugue. Brendan hurried over to the young man.

  “I need you to stay here, okay? Can you do that? I need to talk to you some more.”

  “Okay,” said the young man in a dolorous tone.

  “Okay,” echoed Brendan. “Where will you be?”

  “Right here,” said Kevin.

  Brendan lingered a moment. He needed to run inside. So he left Kevin there. He jogged towards the house again. On his way, he whistled. Bostrom looked over. Brendan pointed two fingers at his eyes and then pointed them back at Kevin Heilshorn. Watch him. Bostrom nodded, and lifted a hand in the air. Brendan sprang in through the front door of the house.

  * * *

  Upstairs, he found the CSI unit still working the room. He nodded at them and then took a look at what he’d come back up to see.

  The doors in the house were old farmhouse doors, the kinds that didn’t have locks. Brendan examined the door. He put on a pair of latex gloves and then ran his hands up and down the side of the door, and then the face of it. He could feel impressions towards the base. Brendan looked closely and saw what appeared to be a little black smudge. Where it had been kicked.

  He then leaned around the door and looked behind it. There was an end table there which looked like it belonged next to the bed, instead of where it had ended up, sitting at an angle. The floors were hard wood. This would make it challenging for the forensics team to lift any hairs or fabric, but they provided clarity for something else. There were whitish scrape marks under the end table.