Straw Man

by Patrick Logan

  “Put a rush on it.”

  Dr. Nordmeyer offered him a placating grimace.

  “You know what’s funny? Every time you cops come in here, you say the same thing: ‘put a rush on it’. Well, when everyone does that, it doesn’t help.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll flag this as high-priority,” Yasiv offered.

  “Yeah, you all say that, too.”

  Drake exhaled loudly.

  “What about the mannequin? Is it a special brand? Does it have a serial number? Anything like that?”

  “Do I look like some sort of seamstress?”

  There were times during their strained friendship that Beckett’s cavalier attitude, his cockiness, and his foul language, had pissed Drake off. Pissed him off so badly that he wanted to throttle the skinny shit. But right now, he would have paid his left nut to have Beckett talk about the mannequin’s perfect tits or smooth ass.

  Anything so that he didn’t have to put up with Dr. Karen Nordmeyer for one second longer.

  “Alright, just send me—send him the images and anything else you find.”

  “Okay. Oh, one more thing,” Dr. Nordmeyer said, reaching beneath the table. She retrieved a small plastic bag and held it up to the light. “I found this clinging to the back of the left leg.”

  “What is it?” Hanna asked.

  “A piece of straw.”

  “What kind of straw?” Drake squinted at the four-inch- yellow strand through the plastic evidence bag.

  “Wheat—but this is all I found. Just one piece. Not sure if it’s contamination from the gallery or if it’s relevant.”

  Drake didn’t know what to make of it either. He thanked the ME, and took one final look at the skins before turning and leaving the morgue.

  Hanna and Yasiv joined him soon after.

  “What a—”

  Drake held up his hand and Hanna fell silent.

  “I know, I know. But she’s all we’ve got. Piss her off and I guarantee she puts our case at the bottom of the pile.”

  “Well, what the hell do we do now, then?” Hanna asked, running a hand through her hair.

  Drake sighed again and exhaustion took hold. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d already channeled his inner Beckett.

  “We look for three women missing their skin. That’s what we do.”

  Chapter 16

  “Was the video deleted or never recorded?” Screech asked as he made two cups of coffee.

  “I have a pretty good tech working on it and so far… nothing. He can’t find any footage at all.”

  Screech frowned and brought Dunbar his coffee. What most people didn’t realize about ‘deleting’ something from a computer is that it never actually goes anywhere. The data is all still there, spread across the hard drive in dozens of tiny pieces, but the computer forgets where to find it. As time goes on, some of these data are overwritten by new files, but this doesn’t happen overnight—it’s a random process. Specialized programs can hunt out these bits of data and stitch them back together. If Dunbar’s tech was a good one, as he’d said, and he couldn’t find anything, then likely nothing had been recorded.

  They remained silent while they sipped their coffee, which was considerably better than the sludge Screech had picked up from a street vendor.

  “Right, so we’re looking for someone who has a vendetta against Lisa and Norm Fairchild,” Detective Dunbar said out of the blue.

  Screech looked over the rim of his coffee mug at the man.

  It made sense. After all, they’d both seen how pissed Lisa Fairchild had been when her exhibit was shut down.

  “Yeah, that’s a good place to start.”

  “And if someone was that angry with Lisa, they probably wanted to see the look on her face when things went to shit.”

  Screech straightened.

  “The photographs,” he said.

  The door to DSLH opened and both men jumped.

  “What photographs?” Leroy asked, a tray of coffees in hand. He took one look at the mugs in Dunbar’s and Screech’s hands and frowned. “Shit, I see you couldn’t wait.”

  “We’ll get to those, don’t worry.”

  Leroy set the tray down on his desk, threw his gym bag to the floor, and made his way over to them.

  “Gonna be a long night?” he asked, leaning into the computer monitor.

  “If we’re lucky,” Screech grumbled.

  “I don’t see any photographs.”

  “I was just loading them up.”

  As Screech navigated to the digital photographs that had been taken of the guests from the gallery, his mind turned to Lisa Fairchild. He suspected that there were a great many people who wanted to see her fail, but that wasn’t his focus, right now.

  Where did you go?

  A woman like that would have soaked up the praise from her guests like a starving tree pulling water into its roots.

  And yet she hadn’t.

  Lisa had slipped away and somehow disappeared.

  “You okay?”

  Screech shook his head, coming back to the present. He took a big gulp of his coffee.

  “No, I’m fucking tired. But let’s do this.”

  For the next hour, the three men went through the guest list, comparing those names to the photos that the NYPD officer had taken from the gallery. They double-checked that the licenses provided to them were legitimate by cross-referencing them with the DMV. In the end, they came up with the names of six people who were present but had fled after the skinsuit had been discovered and before they were told not to leave.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  “We have their names, shouldn’t take too long to find their numbers.” Screech scratched his chin. “Better yet, their addresses. We can—what? What’s wrong?”

  Dunbar had a strained expression on his face.

  “That’s not going to fly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to have to wait until morning.”

  “Fuck.”

  Screech shook his head. He expected railroading but was surprised that it had come this soon.

  “This is all we have to go on,” he grumbled.

  “Okay, someone want to let me in on why we can’t go after these people? I mean, they looked scared and all, but they could still be the ones responsible for that… thing,” Leroy said. “And if they are, what are the chances they just stick around with their thumbs up their asses? We should go visit them as soon as possible.”

  Dunbar looked like he was about to answer, but Screech intervened. The last thing he wanted was for the detective to talk in similes and euphemisms that would only serve to confuse. He needed to speak in a language that Leroy would understand.

  “They’re rich, Leroy. Rich people live by different rules. Rules that say we can’t wake them from their beauty slumber.” Screech looked at Dunbar. “We can talk to them, or try to, but at their convenience and with their lawyers present.”

  Dunbar’s jaw set, but he didn’t disagree.

  “Fuckin’ fantastic.” Leroy walked over to the couch and lay down, putting his hands behind his head. “Wake me up when we’re allowed to speak to the enlightened ones, sire.”

  Dunbar said, “We’re not done yet.”

  Screech raised an eyebrow.

  “The wait staff.”

  “I’m guessing they don’t need their sleep,” Leroy said from the couch. “Or can afford a lawyer.”

  Screech ignored his partner and repeated the same task that he’d done with the guests: comparing the photos to the work manifest that they’d obtained from Lisa Fairchild. Ignoring Leroy did nothing to silence the man, however; despite all of his talk about slumber, he appeared to be in a chatty mood.

  “Hey, Dunbar, any update on Tobin Tomlin?” Leroy asked. “What charges they’re going to lay on that prick?”

  Dunbar grunted.

  “That piece of shit is in a coma. So long as he stays that way, the charges will remain pending. Le
t’s hope he stays that way.”

  Screech pulled back from the computer.

  “It’s for the best, Screech. For everyone—”

  “No, not that,” he said, waving the detective’s comments away. Of course, he wanted Tobin to stay a vegetable. If the man they called the Internet Killer woke up, he might have something to say about how Drake had ‘apprehended’ him. “The waitstaff… how many were there?”

  Dunbar looked confused so Screech clarified.

  “The waitstaff—how many waitstaff were on-site? At the gallery?”

  Dunbar shrugged and Screech, annoyed, grabbed the manifest. He tapped the list of names.

  “Eight—according to this, there were eight waitstaff at the gallery.” Screech answered his own question and then turned around and focused his attention on the computer monitor. “Look here and tell me what you see.”

  Dunbar leaned in close, and Leroy slid off the couch and joined him.

  “I see eight people—happy, not rich,” Leroy said with a shrug. “They probably need some sleep.”

  “Then who the fuck is this guy?” Screech brought up the video footage from the gallery hallway. “Him.”

  The man was holding a tray of champagne glasses as he spoke to Lisa, moments before they both disappeared, one after the other. Screech paused the video just as the camera caught a clear view of the man’s face.

  “He’s not in the pictures—he wasn’t there at the end with the other waiters.”

  “How can you tell? They all look the—”

  Screech had expected this response.

  “Yeah, sure, they all look the same. But there are nine waiters here, on site—not eight.”

  Screech pulled up the cameras from the rest of the gallery with the same timestamp and Leroy used his finger to count all the waiters.

  “Nine,” he agreed.

  Screech switched back to the scene of Lisa speaking to the man in the hallway.

  “She looks like she knows him,” he remarked.

  “Sure does,” Leroy agreed.

  “Well, it looks like we’re going to have to speak to Lisa, too, then,” Dunbar said under his breath. Then he added, “In the morning.”

  For the second time that night, Screech jumped as the door to DSLH flew open. A tired Damien Drake strode in, with Hanna on his left and Sergeant Yasiv on his right.

  “What do you need to speak to Lisa about?” Drake asked.

  Screech waited for the three of them to join him behind his computer monitor.

  “About this man… because he wasn’t supposed to be there last night. He wasn’t supposed to be at the gallery.”

  Chapter 17

  “You sure?” Drake asked.

  Screech nodded, and Dunbar confirmed it.

  “Yeah, this guy speaks to Lisa, they disappear, then…” Dunbar waited for Screech to fast-forward the video. “He’s gone. His picture wasn’t taken by the NYPD and, before you say it, I checked the video footage of the waitstaff while in the lobby and he doesn’t show up there either.”

  Drake’s eyes narrowed.

  “Well, where the hell did he go?”

  “This is probably him. Snuck out with the half dozen or so patrons who saw the thing and decided to hightail it out of there.”

  Drake leaned closer to the computer monitor and watched a figure in a dark coat slip out of the front door. He seemed calm and collected while those around him panicked.

  “Did he get in a car?”

  Dunbar shrugged.

  “Don’t know. He just vanishes.” The detective looked at Yasiv and the man nodded.

  “I’ll instruct some of the grunts to look for any video footage from storefronts around the gallery, see if we can track this guy down.”

  “The back, as well,” Drake instructed.

  Another nod.

  “Sure, the back parking lot. In the meantime, Dunbar, grab a shot of this guy’s face and send it to our boys in 62nd for facial recognition.”

  Drake cleared his throat and stood up straight.

  “We need to speak to Lisa again, ask her who the hell this man is.”

  Yasiv cocked his head to one side.

  “We will, Drake, but not tonight.”

  Drake bit back a curse and worked his jaw.

  Even though he’d been hired specifically because he was outside the influence of those in power, Drake still found himself bowing to their rules. He looked up and was surprised to see that everyone was staring at him—Dunbar, Screech, Leroy, Hanna, and Yasiv. He knew what they expected him to say, too, that Yasiv could go fuck himself, that he was going to wake Lisa up in the middle of the night and make her tell him who the hell this unknown man was.

  There had been a time when Drake would have done just that, but two new skills, underdeveloped as they were, kept nagging at him, teasing him like a comb through heavily knotted hair: patience and tact.

  People like Norm and Lisa Fairchild, those with nearly unlimited funds, couldn’t be strong-armed the same way a deviant like Tobin Tomlin could. The walls they’d already erected would only get thicker and their dipshit lawyer would quickly become an entire law firm.

  “What time is it?” Drake asked, giving himself another moment to think.

  “Two-thirty,” Leroy answered.

  “You have autonomy, Drake, but I—” Yasiv started, clearly thinking that Drake was going to revert to his old ways.

  Drake waved his hand.

  “In the morning,” he confirmed. For some reason, he felt like he was letting his crew down and averted his gaze. The truth was, he had some shit to take care of in the meantime. And in the morning, they’d be more prepared, have more focused questions for Lisa. And perhaps Dr. Nordmeyer would come up with something concrete on the skins, mannequin, or sutures that they could use as leverage. “Let’s all go home, get a couple of hours of sleep, then meet back here at seven.”

  To his surprise, nobody complained.

  Hanna and Leroy left first, offering tired farewells on the way out.

  “You need a ride?” Drake offered Screech.

  “I’m okay.” Although he left it at that, they both knew what he meant. Screech was going to stay here, probably all night, trying to track down this mysterious waiter. Judging by the dark circles under his eyes, Drake would have thought the man’s time better served doing as he’d suggested, but he wasn’t going to argue with him.

  Yasiv’s walkie-talkie burst to life, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  “Shit.” The sergeant turned the volume down and took a step backward. He listened for a moment, then he eyed Dunbar.

  “What is it?”

  “We gotta go,” Yasiv said quickly.

  “I’ll—” Drake stopped himself. He was about to say, I’ll go with you. He’d been a cop for much longer than a PI, and something about tonight, more than any of the other cases he’d been involved in, had put him back in those shoes.

  In the blue and white uniform.

  “—see you in the morning.”

  Yasiv and Dunbar hurried off and Drake observed Screech again.

  In many ways, the skinny man with short blond hair and stringy goatee reminded him of his late partner, Clay Cuthbert. Not so much physically, other than both being thin, but they were similarly loyal and reliable. They were also both stubborn and determined—good qualities to have in a partner.

  “You asleep?”

  Drake blinked and then rubbed his eyes.

  “Naw, just heading out. You sure you don’t want a ride?”

  This was a not-so-subtle encouragement for the man to just go home—to get some rest.

  Screech stared at him for a moment longer but didn’t take the bait.

  “I’m good. Thanks.”

  As Drake left DSLH and headed to his car he couldn’t help but think that Screech wasn’t good at all.

  And that maybe his partner wouldn’t ever be ‘good’ again.

  What the hell happened to you, Screech? What the hell is goi
ng on?

  Chapter 18

  As Drake drove across the city, his thoughts kept turning back to what the ME had said, about how the women were likely alive when they’d been stripped of their skin. He wasn’t a religious man, but he still felt compelled to pray that the girls were at least sedated before the animal who had done this to them had gotten started.

  An itch under his left arm distracted him, and Drake scratched greedily. When he was done, he looked at his hand surprised to see several orange hairs stuck to his fingers.

  “What the hell?”

  It took him a moment to figure out where they’d come from.

  Cosmo.

  An unexpected sadness overcame him then. What was supposed to be an easy case—find a cat, collect the cash—had ended up in Drake hunting a murderer across the Internet. What bothered him more, he realized now, wasn’t what had happened to Tobin Tomlin—that piece of shit got exactly what he deserved—and not even the fate that befell the poor cat, as horrific and savage as that was.

  It was the fact that he’d lied to the old woman. Poor Mrs. Schmidt, clearly suffering from the beginnings of dementia, who loved that cat more than anything else in the world.

  And Drake had lied to her, replaced the woman’s dead cat with a lookalike, hoping that she wouldn’t notice.

  It seemed almost reprehensible to get emotional over such a thing, considering the morally and ethically questionable deeds that Drake had carried out over the past few years. Lying to an old lady? Hell, that didn’t even crack the top fifty.

  You’re getting soft, Drake.

  But the violence, the brutality, and the sheer intensity of emotion underlying each of those other acts set them apart. It didn’t take sophisticated mental gymnastics to justify measures that were fueled by a drug that caused your blood pressure to increase, pupils to dilate, and your lungs to expand. Adrenaline could make sane people do crazy things and crazy people to act in ways that were incomprehensible.

  Drake had decided to trick Mrs. Schmidt when he’d been stone-cold sober, even before Patty had shown him Cosmo’s doppelganger. This choice had been made when he’d offered the woman a promise, something that a cop, or PI, should never do.