HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by T. J. Brearton

  Brendan flipped to the Red Lights site again. He started going through the videos. He began to cry at some point, and got himself back into the vodka. He hadn’t eaten anything for so long he couldn’t remember.

  They were all on the inside, and he was out.

  Even his wife and daughter. If only they had listened to him. If only his wife hadn’t had to have been such a bitch and so pig-headed and gone off on her own. So he had been a little tipsy? So what? He had driven hundreds of times under the influence. Maybe thousands. He would have gotten them home safe. He would have.

  She just hadn’t trusted him.

  No one trusted him.

  Not the Department, not Delaney, not Olivia.

  Goddamn that Olivia. Fucking therapist-client confidentiality. Extending beyond death? Ludicrous. People worried too much about what everyone else thought.

  Not Rebecca, though. Rebecca hadn’t cared. She’d done her thing. She’d said to hell with them all.

  He liked her. Brendan liked Rebecca. He would find her in this mess. He would find her killer.

  He would bring her spirit peace.

  Sitting half on the couch, his leg stuck out at an awkward angle, Brendan passed out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE / FRIDAY, 2:02 PM

  Someone was pounding on the door. Brendan woke to find himself in between the couch and the coffee table, lying on the floor. As though in a crypt.

  He tried to get up, but it was tough going. His head felt like it was encased in stone. His whole body ached. His guts had been swabbed out by wire wool. He was afraid he might have wet himself.

  He heard the door open. He was sure he had locked it. He called out.

  “Hello?” His voice was a croak.

  “Shut up,” he heard. “I’m gonna do the talking, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  There was no mistaking the voice. Brendan managed to raise himself up enough to look over the coffee table as the man walked through the doorway into the living room.

  Seamus Argon had auburn hair with swaths of gray around the ears. His beard was curly and mostly gray. His eyes were hard and alive. He scanned the room, and then his gaze fell on Brendan.

  “Jesus,” he said. “This is worse than I thought.”

  * * *

  “You haven’t been going to meetings.”

  “I’ve been on a case,” Brendan said.

  “I don’t care if it’s your own murder case and you’re the victim, you got to do the meetings.”

  “I’ve never . . . I don’t know how to handle this case. It’s a mess.”

  “Shut up,” said Argon softly but firmly. “Like I said, I’ll do the talking.”

  He had one bag with him. It was a grey and maroon gym bag that looked like it had been around since the seventies, with a faded “Nike” emblem on one side. He set this down beside him.

  “What good are you to anyone like this?”

  “Why are you here?”

  Brendan was helping himself onto the couch. He grimaced with the effort; his body was sore and his hip had stiffened up something wicked. He looked around for the vodka.

  “You know why I’m here.”

  “I mean, who called you?”

  “Your Sheriff called me.”

  Brendan nodded. He found the vodka at the far end of the coffee table and stretched for it. There were a few ounces left in the bottle. Nearby was an overturned glass. Brendan righted it. It was smoky with smeared fingerprints and lip-prints. He unscrewed the cap on the vodka bottle and poured.

  Seamus Argon watched the ritual wordlessly.

  Brendan drank the liquor and sat back. His eyes met Argon’s with a defiant look in them.

  “So?”

  “For the third and final time, Healy, shut your mouth. Sit there, and don’t say a fucking word. Nod if you understand me.”

  Brendan nodded. His head was splitting. He poured the rest of the vodka into the glass and drank it. He would need to go into the kitchen and get more.

  Argon found a chair in the dining nook and brought it over. He set it in front of the couch and coffee table and sat down. Argon was lithe for a man in his sixties. He was heavy, but it was solid weight. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

  Brendan chanced saying one more thing. He looked at the empty vodka bottle.

  “I’ll quit.”

  “ ‘I’ll quit,’ said the drunk.” Argon looked less than amused. Now he sat back and lifted one leg across the other.

  “This is how we met. You, a wreck. Hammered out of your gourd. For weeks. Not doing anybody any good, dishonoring the memory of your wife and child. Car in the garage, engine running . . .”

  Brendan shot Argon a look as sharp as knives. Argon dismissed it.

  “Oh, that pisses you off? That’s all you got, Healy, is your anger. Your guilt. So what, get pissed off. Is that what happened with Kevin Heilshorn? Did he piss you off?”

  “No,” said Brendan firmly.

  The men glared at each other. Then Argon softened a little. “You know, someone once told me a story. About human habits. Do you remember? It was interesting – I had never really thought about it. But I was told that humans, because we’ve only been out of the jungle just so long – still have a lot of old tapes playing, like they say in the program. And while we may have started weaving baskets 30,000 years ago in our hunter-gatherer shit, civilization as we know it has only been the past five grand. So we’re still mostly these little nomadic groups, with these instincts to hunt, to store up goods. Look at what we’ve done with that. Americans have so much stored up that we have to rent space to keep the shit we got. We also carry with us this negativistic thinking. A necessary survival mechanism from when we were running from the tigers and bears. Keeping a lookout for the next potential threat. Now we’ve killed most those lions and bears and put the rest in zoos. But we still have that wariness. That’s what you told me the night I became your sponsor, and we stood outside the church on Broad Street. Smoking cigarettes. You remember?”

  Brendan stared back impassively.

  “Negative thinking was one of the oldest human habits, that’s what you said. And I believed you.”

  Argon fell silent. Outside the light was already fading. The cold snap over the past few days was gone and warm weather was returning; things were expected to return to the eighties, even the nineties, by the weekend.

  “So, I had a long talk with Taber. He likes you. Likes you a lot. Acts like he hit the Irish Sweepstakes with you, in fact. Delaney is a good investigator, but that’s all he’s ever been. Good. Adequate. And he’s a little shady. Taber’s never been able to catch him red-handed, but he suspects Ambrose may have pocketed a seizure or two, in his time. He’s one of these guys who is cliquey, you know. Dyed-in-the-wool Central New Yorker; traces his lineage back to the Dutch settlers, that kind of shit. But Taber likes you. Thinks you’re sharp. He hated what happened but he handled it the best he could, with the shooting, with this girl’s father poking his narrow, well-heeled ass into things.”

  “He’s covering.”

  Seamus raised his eyebrows. “Is he? Heilshorn, you mean?”

  Brendan nodded.

  “For who? Himself? His daughter? Or these politicos in Albany who like XList escorts?”

  Brendan sat up straight.

  “What did you just say?”

  Argon narrowed his eyes. “I know about them. Taber knows about it, too. But they’re not what you’re tracking. You’re tracking Rebecca’s killer. And you have to stay focused on that.”

  Brendan nodded absently. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. He temporarily forgot about getting more to drink.

  “But the name – XList. I know that name.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do. But, like I said, that’s not what you’re tracking.”

  “Then what am I tracking? I don’t understand.”

  Argon leaned forward again.

  “You need to get better. You need to physically an
d mentally restore yourself. Then you can restore your spirit. Do you understand? First the spirit gets sick. Then the body. Then the mind.”

  “What do you know, Argon? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Goddammit, you just said the name of a company that has Rebecca Heilshorn in a pornographic video, and that same company is the escort service. That’s something.”

  “XList is an underground thing. I’ve heard it also just called ‘the Company.’ There are rumors about politicians – all types – with a taste for porn stars, models, what have you. It’s come up here or there, but that’s it. It’s an expression. That’s all you need to know. And I’m not a detective. I’m a beat cop, Healy. That’s all God ever meant for me. I know where I stand. But, I found you, didn’t I? I was put in your path. I’ve picked you up and dusted you off before, now here I am again. There won’t be a third time. And I’ve been in the game long enough, I’ve seen enough to know where to look in a situation like this. The victim, Rebecca, she has a daughter. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to think about something, because it was a long drive over here, and I had a lot of time to ponder, myself. I wonder about something. I wonder about these women who get into this kind of business, what happens when they get pregnant. I wonder if they decide, for whatever reason, that they don’t want to have an abortion. But, let’s say they have a contract. The kind of contract that, well, you can’t exactly hire a lawyer to get you out of.”

  Brendan’s addled mind started to focus. He recalled the idea he’d had that Rebecca had been protecting something. The possible reason why she hadn’t identified the man who came to her door the morning she called 911.

  Things started to line up, then.

  The diaper sprayer she’d mentioned to Jason Pert, the kid from Kettering’s hardware store.

  The fact that no paternity record was on file for Eddie Stemp as Leah’s father.

  The thought recurred that Leah’s father might have really been some judge or congressman in Albany.

  And what about Kevin Heilshorn?

  Some new idea, exciting, horrifying, seemed to bite at the back of Brendan’s sodden mind.

  “Jesus,” he breathed.

  “Getting something?”

  “What if . . .?” Brendan began. He shook his head for a moment. Was it too reaching? Too absurd?

  “Tell me.”

  “What if her brother, Kevin, what if he had been trying to protect someone, too. And what if he was so protective of that something that he was willing to kill the people who might expose the secret?”

  Argon cocked his head, waiting for more.

  “A baby,” said Brendan. “A child. Maybe more than one child. Like what you’re talking about. Illegitimate children born of these relationships. Held as collateral, blackmail, until certain . . . obligations are fulfilled. Certain contracts honored.”

  Brendan shook his head. “It’s crazy. Is it possible?”

  Argon did not share the skepticism. “Remember the woman who called us, oh, I don’t know, maybe twenty times that one month? That DD we kept coming back to?”

  Healy looked up at his old partner. He did remember. A woman in her mid-forties had called repeatedly about her husband, who she claimed was beating himself up. She had been a Wall Street broker, one of few women in a man’s world, and he had been the Dean of Students at a preppy private school. Not the type of people who were stereotypically calling the cops about domestic violence, missing teeth, and wearing dirty white t-shirts.

  It turned out that the couple had lost a child. Their two-year-old had gotten away from them at a theme park some years before and had never turned up again.

  “Situations involving children, involving blood, they can be a whole different ball game.” Argon gave Brendan a grave look.

  Brendan barely nodded. He was recalling pulling up at the door of the nice home in Hawthorne where the couple lived. She had quit her job, and he had been fired from his, following the disappearance of their child.

  “She had made him promise,” Argon said quietly. “She made him promise to find their child, and that until he did, there would never be peace in their home. That hell would stay with them. The husband had hired every notable private investigator, and worked personally with the FBI every day since the child had disappeared. You know the saying: to a worm in the horseradish, the world is horseradish. And in the meantime, he had been smashing himself with a hammer in various places. He said it kept him vigilant.”

  “That’s right,” said Brendan, now remembering it all.

  The first few times they’d gone to the house, they’d been understandably cynical about the situation. The man had been careful to hide his injuries. Finally, Argon had noticed that two of his fingers were smashed and called for him to be hospitalized, since he was clearly a danger to himself. In the hospital, he tried to bite his own tongue off. He blamed himself for their missing child.

  “And you saw it,” said Argon. “You saw that blame, that guilt, and what it did to him. And I remember thinking that there was hope for you, that you would see your way to forgive yourself for your own wife and child. For not getting in the car with them that night. For doing what you thought you should do in that situation. You wanted to protect them, Brendan. That’s what you were doing.”

  Brendan felt the hot sting of tears in his eyes. He had been protecting them, yes. From himself. And in doing so, he had gotten them killed.

  As if reading his thoughts, Argon said, “You did not get them killed. The driver of that truck did. He had been up for three days straight. The Saw Mill is a fast highway, fast as I-95. Accidents all the time. You can feel the movement of the earth there, you know that. And that night, the earth swallowed them up. It spared you, Brendan, because you were meant to continue on. You were meant to find this girl’s killer.”

  The tears were running down his face now. Mucus dripped from his nose.

  “And if by finding her killer I compromise the protection of the innocent? What then? These people were willing to die to keep this child – or these children – safe. What am I doing, coming into the middle of it?”

  “But they’re not safe. Wherever they are, whoever has got them, they’re not safe.”

  And a silence fell over the men, and the room, as the afternoon shadows stretched longer.

  Brendan knew his recovery now would be painful. He would suffer every terrible notion his mind could render. His thoughts would be nightmares. His body would be sick and crave the alcohol it needed to keep going. He would fight to keep drinking, and he would fight to stay sober. His mind would be a battleground for the coming days.

  He looked across the room at Argon, who gave him a cool, steely gaze.

  Argon would stand between Brendan and oblivion. “All that shit that happened – you called it your reckoning. But this is your reckoning, now. It never ends.”

  Brendan got to his feet. Argon stood, too, and helped the limping detective into the kitchen. The two men then went about pouring the poison down the drain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR / MONDAY, 7:18 AM

  He had woken up and dressed very early that morning, but it wasn’t early enough to catch Argon, who was gone.

  Brendan stood in the living room, holding his fresh mug of coffee and looking at the couch where Argon had slept for three nights. It was now empty. The old cop had even folded up the blanket he’d drawn across his large frame each night. He had placed a small object on top of the blanket, a gift to Brendan.

  Brendan sipped his coffee. He felt good. He knew from previous experience that post-acute withdrawal from alcohol had effects which could last for a long time. Aversion to people and crowds, claustrophobia, depression; it all came with the territory. But the last time he had gotten clean had followed a twenty-year drinking period, and those final days had been round the clock abuse. This time, he’d only been inside the bottle for a week. It had taken everything he had to cra
wl back out again.

  He leaned on his crutches. He had a doctor’s appointment later in the day, but first he was going to go in and make the IACP meeting, as Argon had instructed. Brendan had called them just a few minutes ago to set it up. They had been happy to hear from him, and he would meet them at eight that morning.

  He had dressed in his navy tie and a powder blue shirt. He slid his dark gray blazer over this. As he looked at himself in the mirror he thought his hair had grown too long, but for now he brushed it back. He trimmed his finger nails and, of course, shaved, leaving a mustache and bit of beard framing his mouth. He had been shaving every day since he’d started the job, but change was good.

  He would miss Argon. He could imagine no one else seeing him through the darkness of the last 72 hours. Getting off a serious binge was hell. But it was over now, the last fumes dissipated from his pores and evacuated from his intestines. His mind felt clear.

  He got into the Camry ten minutes later. He opened the back door first and fed in the crutches, turning them at an angle so they would fit. Then he carefully got himself into the driver’s seat.

  He adjusted the rear view mirror and took Argon’s gift, a small crucifix, and fastened it around his neck. Seamus Argon was not an overtly religious-type. He had found his faith years before – or rediscovered it, to use the man’s own term – and claimed that it had seen him through. He didn’t expect others to follow in the same path, but like most AA members, he believed that acknowledgment of a higher power was a key element in the healing process. It had been something Brendan had struggled with in the past, but he found the crucifix hung round his neck more easily that morning.

  He paused before backing out of the driveway. He wondered at the nature of addiction, and habit. He was a man of science. Investigation and evidence were the hallmarks of his process of understanding the world, not faith and superstition. Yet as he grew older, where one ended and the other began, became less distinct. He thought of Eddie Stemp talking about possession. About demons and spiritual access points. When a man like Seamus Argon came into your home and helped you rid yourself of a horrible toxic affliction, it was, on the one hand, a simple biochemical scenario. The neurotransmitters in the brain became hijacked with the extra dopamine that the alcohol amped up. The cellular receptors in the body became literally addicted to the peptides spilled by the affected glands of the body. In order to pull out of it, they needed to be denied the substance which had laid siege and be given time to readjust. There were no slippery, scaly demons lurking somewhere within the body, but, on the other hand, through all the research Brendan had done in school and then at the university laboratory in his earlier career as a neuroscientist, the discipline was unable to provide answers to some very basic questions.