by Adira August
“Slow down. What do you mean she called dispatch herself?” Natani asked.
“Dispatch got a text. ‘4 Lt Dane’ with her address. They forwarded it at seven a.m. But it ended up in the queue and I didn’t get it. It had to be from her, from her missing cell phone. She wanted us there before Ikeda and her father showed up.”
“Or to arrive while they were still there,” Merisi said. “I didn’t think of Hideyoshi also being in the car. That’s why Ikeda took so long to call.”
“I’m wondering if you can think of anything we missed,” Hunt said. “Something left somewhere Ikeda and her father wouldn’t find it, but the police would.”
“Fuck.” Merisi stood up. “Diane, is there any chance you can get me a phone warrant for Penelope Maki’s apartment?”
She glanced at Hunter. It was the first time Merisi had used her first name. “The DNA came back today?”
“It’s time-stamped oh-eight-seventeen this morning,” Avia answered for him, putting an image of the fax to Zee on the big monitor.
“Then the search warrant’s good until midn-”—Merisi was halfway to the door—”-ight”
“Mike!” Hunt yelled at him. Merisi hesitated.
“Grab a camera. Make sure you have evidence bags and—nevermind. Twee, go with him.”
She grinned. “Yes, sir.”
They didn’t even remember to shut the door.
“It’s like Dad said they could go to the carnival on a school night,” Natani smirked.
Hunter Dane did not need a reminder he was a decade older than most of his team. “Let’s just hope the kids bring home a prize. … Avia, tell us about the Hortt Orchards suspect.”
“Okay … his prints identify him as Russell Robl, a just-post VietNam conflict vet with a general discharge deemed ‘psychologically unsuited for military service’.” Copies of birth records and missing persons reports appeared on the monitor. “Robl was discharged in August of seventy-six and promptly dropped off the face of the Earth. When his father met his bus in Reno, Nevada, he wasn’t on it. He was twenty when he vanished. He’s sixty-one years old.”
She stopped.
“That’s it?” Natani asked.
“I just got it,” Avia said. “I think the Lieutenant has something, though.”
“Cross-reference him with the victims first,” Hunter told her.
“Schizophrenic?” Natani asked Hunter.
“Hang on.” Hunt waited for Avia to finish her search.
“John Michael Hortt, born 1947. Found shot to death in his kitchen in 1997. Vietnam vet, Purple Heart … assigned to 204th MI Detachment, whatever that is.” She frowned. “One second.”
She scrolled up. “Russell Robl. 204th MI Detachment. Does this mean they knew each other?”
“Not necessarily, that’s a whole lot of men. But I suspect they did. We’d have to interview the families, the military won’t be giving anything up.”
Hunter flipped a couple pages back in his notebook. “I talked to Jennifer Lora, head of the forensic psych team at Denver Health. She’s taken over Russell Robl’s treatment and assessment. She will not make a definitive diagnosis this early, but she doubts he will ever be deemed competent to stand trial.”
“Doubts.” Natani repeated. “When will she know?”
He shrugged. “She says treating him for his extreme malnutrition, identifying mental illness if present, finding medications that might help him become communicative, all must be done before she can make a firm assessment. She said months.”
“Bullshit!”
“Indeed,” Hunter agreed.
“Kinda like watching vultures circle a guy dying in the desert.” Avia shook her head.
“Yeah, except they’re all on the ground trying to drag him away in different directions.” Natani said, not hiding her disgust.
“Don’t feel too sorry for him, he killed four people.” Avia said.
“We don’t know that.” Hunter exchanged a look with Natani.
Avia just blinked at him. “Are you …? I mean, you’re serious?”
Natani nodded. “Dane’s right. At this moment, I don’t have enough to charge him.”
There was little Hunter Dane enjoyed more than sitting at a poker table full of minnows who’d convinced themselves they were sharks. And right now, all the would-be sharks were circling his case, with him in the middle.
“Robl is on a seventy-two hour hold,” he said. “Doctor Lora will petition the court to transfer him to the custody of Denver Health and Hospitals for the length of the assessment. Diane, how can you make an end run around her?”
“I need evidence.”
“Rivers, what’s in Twee’s preliminary list of items seized from the crawl space today?”
She pulled up a document and smiled. “We seem to have a gun, Boss. It’s broken, but definitely a gun.”
“It is, in fact, the same calibre as the one that killed John Hortt and the bullet that was found in the wood of a cabinet when Evelyn Hortt was killed.”
He turned a page. “A telephone conversation with Candace Hortt Farleigh in which I told her we had a suspect in her parent’s murders, resulted in her breaking down. She handed the call to her husband.”
Hunter stopped to give both women a severe look. “As you may have surmised looking into things not part of your jobs, this case was dumped on the Unit by Captain VanDevere. He was able to do that by convincing the Chief that R.G. Farleigh would be outraged if it wasn’t handled by an elite Unit.”
“Yeah, why’d he do that?” Avia asked.
Instead of answering her, Hunter stood and stretched. “Mr. Farleigh would be very unhappy if the investigation did not continue and the suspect was not specifically charged in the deaths of his wife’s parents. Which his attorney should already have told the Chief. Which means we will be getting those orders any minute thanks to a special assist from Horace VanDevere who convinced the Chief that Farleigh is a much bigger dog than he actually is.”
“Wait a second. You’re saying we keep the case and it stays active?” Diane asked.
“Which means it stays private, right?” Avia asked. “That the Unit’s mandate: discretion. The case stays on our servers and all the evidence is under Twee’s care?”
“Right in one,” Hunter said. “I’ve made arrangements for Phillip Greenstein—Professor Emeritus former director of Forensic Psychiatry—to take over Mr. Robl’s care. Doctor Lora should be stepping aside as we speak.”
A series of chimes alerted them to incoming messages. “Confirmations,” Avia said reading through the emails. “And … whoa. Hu - um - Lieutenant, Greenstein wants you down there asap.”
She looked up at him. “He says Robl is asking for you.”
THE FISH WERE GLAD to see Merisi. His parents always had fish and he knew they’d be okay for a day or two without food. But when he sprinkled the pale brown flakes onto the water’s surface, they all darted up—a roiling storm of flashing colors churning the surface of a very small sea.
The food particles drifted down and the fish swooped through the cascade, some nosing through the gravel on the aquarium floor.
“That thing almost took my fingers off,” Twee said when she came into the bedroom from the kitchen.
Merisi was sitting cross-legged in his sock feet on the bare futon bed. “I’ll call animal control when we’re done.”
“Good. It was the only thing she asked us to do, take care of the fish.”
“You’re exactly right. She asked us.” He seemed to be meditating on the fish tank. “What do you see?”
She perched next to him on the narrow bed. “Well … it’s a long aquarium not a tall one. The thing it sits on is like her other stuff, black and plain. It’s all clean. Modern. No sunken chests. Nice rocks. Beautiful feathery stalks of plants waving. The bottom is a really thick layer of black gravel. There’s some kind of black on the back, so the fish colors are really bright and clear. It’s like a Japanese garden under water. Simple and p
erfect…”
She stopped and pointed, “What’s that thing on the side?”
“Water filter. Hangs on the outside and the water is pumped in and out of it.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “It has to be on the narrow end to be efficient?”
His eyes glittered. “Nope. That’s a black film she’s put on for a background. Specially made for aquariums. You hang the filter on the back in the corner. The film hides it.”
Twee got up and used her small flashlight to examine the filter without touching it. “This is charcoal down here?”
“Right.”
She looked at him. “Mike, this filter thing is like, in a perfect line with the center of the bed,”
“Yeah. What else?”
“Is it supposed to be this big?”
He slid off the bed. “No. Not for this size tank. Get the video camera. Let’s record this part of the search.” He started rolling up his right sleeve.
Twee left and came back with a clutch of camera straps in one hand and her case in the other.
“Start here. You got a light?”
She handed him a small, battery-operated LED light. He held it up in one hand and used the other to unplug the filter. He lifted the whole mechanism up and dumped the water out into the aquarium.
A fiber filter over the charcoal kept the whole mess from falling into the water. Carefully removing the filter, he dug around in the charcoal, extracting a small black object so tightly wrapped in plastic it looked vacuum-sealed.
“Fuck my aunt, that’s a camera!” Twee held the camera steady, but her voice shook with excitement. “But Mike, it would feed to a computer close by. There was nothing.”
“It wasn’t for her death.” He set the camera on top of the aquarium and put the filter back, plugging it in.
“She had that note clutched hard in her hand, hidden under the covers. She had to fight all the pain, everything and just focus on that until she died. Until she fucking died.”
He gave Twee the camera to put in an evidence baggie.
“She sent us to the aquarium. Just to show us her camera?”
Twee got it. “No. So we’d know there was footage and where to look for it.”
Opening the aquarium lid, he carefully reached down one corner with his naked arm and insinuated his fingertips into the deep, black gravel.
“This is at least twice as much as you need,” he told Twee. A Kuhli loach wriggled frantically up from the gravel. Merisi kept working his way methodically along the front of the tank to the opposite end, moving over a few inches, he felt through the gravel.A pattern search.
Twee held the camera on him, keeping the whole aquarium in the shot. The water became murky with what Twee assumed was old fish poop.
“C’mon, Penney, where else could you hide it?” Mike muttered to the dead girl.
“Mike? Are those real rocks?” Twee asked, seeing how they didn’t move in the disturbed water.
“Not this. It’s a formation cast from resin. Big ones like this are hollow so it won’t displace too… much …” He looked at her.
“Take your time,” she cautioned him.
He felt his way toward the rocks, loosening seaweed that floated to the top. The fish were huddled together at the opposite end of the tank.
“It’s, wax, I think,” he frowned, feeling around the base of the formation. “Wax mixed with sand. I need something to pry with,” he told her.
“I don’t want to stop filming. You have keys?”
He did. “You aren’t sound recording, are you?” He scraped around the edge of the wax.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Sort of wishing I’d skipped the f-bomb.”
The formation suddenly came free and he lifted it out. “It supposed to be a cave. She mixed the sand with the wax when she sealed it, to make it look natural.”
“Leave it on top and I’ll set up a place to work.”
He took the camera.
Plastic sheeting from her case and a few tools made a workspace. They moved the formation and the camera over and she marked it as evidence and filled out a large envelope.
Everything she scraped out went into the envelope. In a few minutes she was inside the “cave” and pulling out a zip bag. In the bag were a memory card and USB flash drive.
She marked them, bagged them and put that bag inside the large one, along with the formation.
Shutting down the camera, Twee marked the time codes on the evidence bag as well as in her notes.
She sat back on her heels. “I don’t understand.”
“What? We’ve got him. Whatever she recorded, we have it. These assholes are toast.”
“She had the proof,” Twee said. “She knew who the Lieutenant was. Why didn’t she just give him this? It would have stopped; she would have been free.”
“No she wouldn’t.” Merisi realized how furious he still was. “No future erases the past.”
PHILLIP GREENSTEIN, M.D., Ph.D. was seventy-one years old when he met Russel Robl, and he was glad. As a younger man he’d have been far more concerned with publishing the case than healing the man. Not that Dr. Greenstein thought Robl could be healed. But he did believe he could be assisted. And while Greenstein’s altruism was genuine, it didn’t stop him from being glad he’d been gifted in his senior years with this most fascinating case.
Greenstein had a beard because he no longer had a wife and could no longer think of a reason to bother shaving. He sported a full-if-thin head of grizzled white hair with eyebrows to match. He wore half-glasses for close work his daughter said made him look like an aging hippie.
“Then they’re appropriate, aren’t they?” he’d responded.
Greenstein had his own office. It was small, but it did have a window, a door that locked and contained his old desk and chair. They gave him the space not because he’d spent the last twenty years of his professional life building the place and program, but because his family name meant money.
Today, he once more had his own patient. Today, he sat behind his desk, swiveled around in his chair, looked out at the snow-tipped peaks of the Front Range.
He was waiting for a homicide detective. He was hoping that detective would at least hide the contempt for him and the patient most cops didn’t bother to mask. Russell Robl and Phillip Greenstein could both use some help that day.
tap-tap-tap
“Doctor Greenstein?”
It was a deep, rich voice. A voice devoid of aggression. Well-modulated. Sane and confident. A voice that gave him a glimmer of hope.
He turned around to find a tall man in a nondescript suit that fitted closely along the shoulders in his open doorway. His thick brown hair lay in easy waves, a shock fallen over his clean forehead just touching a well-defined brow. High cheekbones and a generous mouth, a strong jawline and skin that shaded to bronze without the help of the sun. His grey-blue eyes so thickly-lashed they looked artificially lined.
Greenstein wished the man inside was as comely as his container. Such was rarely the case. He offered his hand across the desk. “You’re the detective who signed Mr. Robl in?”
“Detective Lieutenant Hunter Dane.” He stepped inside, taking Greenstein’s hand. “I appreciate you taking on the case.”
Waving Hunt to a chair, Greenstein felt the glimmer brighten. “Why is that?”
Hunter crossed his legs and relaxed back in the visitor’s chair. “You have a stellar reputation. You’re retired and well off. I’m hoping that adds up to a man who operates independently of political influence.”
“That’s important to you?” Greenstein leaned back in his chair, mirroring Hunter’s posture.
“In my best case scenario, you work with my team so no one battles over the scraps of what’s left of this guy to fulfill some personal agenda,” Hunter answered. “What’s important to you?”
“What’s your agenda, Detective?”
Hunter Dane ignored his question. Fine lines around his eyes and mouth that Greenstein hadn�
�t noticed before, deepened. His eyes went gunmetal dark as his gaze narrowed.
Phillip Greenstein had interviewed and treated many dangerous men—restrained patients he only saw in the presence of a guard. He’d never before been in the presence of killer who wasn’t manacled and didn’t bother to hide what he was. This was not a man who could be handled.
Yes, his life had definitely become more interesting.
“Sorry, Detective,” he apologized, sitting forward. “Old habits.”
Dane relaxed slightly, but didn’t speak.
“I’m not sure what my agenda is yet, beyond helping the patient and making a good assessment for you in terms of ability to stand trial,” Greenstein said. “Mr. Robl remains agitated. He’s weak, there’s no medical history so I don’t want to give him a higher dose of any kind of depressant. My hope is giving him what he wants—you—will help him calm down and be more cooperative with the staff.”
“How did he ask for me? He didn’t know my name.”
“You’re the ‘blanket man’,” Greenstein said. “I have the intake report. He showed up wrapped in a blanket. You told the nurse you’d done that to restrain him. That’s what he keeps saying, get the ‘blanket man’.”
Hunter Dane stood up. Greenstein joined him and led the way out of the office toward the forensic ward.
“You should know, Doctor, that while the quilt did restrain him, I used it because he was disgusting to touch and smelled like a sewer.”
Greenstein took them into a locked corridor.
“You should also know two of us wrapped him up,” Hunter told him. “You might have the wrong blanket man.”
Greenstein stopped in front of a door. “Let’s find out.”
IT WAS A DARK ROOM with several monitors watched by a staff member. Each screen cycled through different patient rooms. Hunter immediately identified Russell Robl on one of the monitors.
“Hold on number four, please,” Greenstein said to the staffer. One monitor showed only Robl.
“Do we have audio?” Hunt asked.
Greenstein reached past the staffer and pressed a button. The room filled with a low mutter, an accompaniment to Robl’s continuous movements of arms, legs and head. Hunter saw he was restrained by soft bands at ankles and one wrist. There was enough play for him to scratch his nose, if needed. One forearm was secured to a white cloth-covered board, an IV line taped down, the board attached to the side rail.
