Next of Kin

by James Tucker

  Ben’s face reddened. “Okay.”

  “Second idea,” Buddy continued. “What if you can’t kick him? Maybe he’s too far away, maybe he’s too close, maybe you can’t get your feet up because you’re in a car or something.”

  Ben watched him carefully.

  Buddy said, “You know what the hardest part of the human body is?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “It’s the bone just above your forehead, right by your hairline.” Buddy held out a hand and lightly touched the boy’s hairline over his forehead. “So you wait until the guy is close to you, real close, and then you push yourself—you drive your head—right into the other guy’s nose or mouth.” Buddy put his hands on Ben’s shoulders and pretended to head butt him. He said, “You push forward at the other guy with everything you’ve got, and you clobber him with your own head. Got it?”

  Ben nodded. “Yep.”

  Buddy wasn’t sure Ben did, but he stood as he heard someone behind him.

  “Why are you moving the furniture?”

  They turned to see Mei standing in the hallway. Her black hair shimmered under the recessed lights. She wore a pair of dark-blue jeans, knee-high leather boots, and a cream-colored silk blouse.

  Buddy thought she looked rich and gorgeous and wondered, as he did each day, what she was doing with an oaf like him. Despite having made love to her more than a hundred times and having entwined their lives, he was hesitant to propose marriage. He simply didn’t deserve her. And if she agreed to marry him, he’d ruin things somehow and wind up alone. Things worked well as they were, he’d decided. It would be too risky to push for more. He smiled and said, “We moved the chest in front of the elevator doors for safety. We’ll move it back in the morning. Hope that’s all right.”

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “Mei, this is the boy I’ve told you about. His name’s Ben Brook.”

  Despite the imposition of having to care for a young boy she’d never met, she smiled warmly at Ben and strode into the foyer. Though Mei wasn’t tall, she bent over and offered her hand to the boy. “I’m Mei Adams,” she said. “I’m glad you’ll be staying with us for a few days.”

  Shyly, Ben took her hand. “Hello,” he said.

  Mei straightened up. “May I take your coat?”

  He nodded, slipped it off, and handed it to her. She took the coat and then held out a hand for his scarf, which he gave her.

  She hung the coat and scarf in the foyer closet and then turned to him. “I’m sautéing some chicken breasts. Is that something you’d like?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Would you take your backpack to the guest bedroom? Just go down this hallway, and it’s the second room on the left. Then if you’d wash your hands in the guest bathroom, we can have dinner right away.”

  After only a moment’s hesitation, he nodded, picked up his backpack, and walked into the hallway. His footsteps sounded faintly on the oak floors.

  Buddy asked, “You all right with this?”

  She smiled at him and whispered, “Yes, it’s all right for a few days. Maybe even longer. Come here.”

  He leaned down, kissed her, and hugged her tightly. God, she felt good. He never tired of coming home to her. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Darling,” she said quietly. “The coat Ben gave me is from Prada. Is he one of the Brooks? The people murdered in the Adirondacks?”

  “Yeah, he is.” Buddy glanced back at the elevator door and said, “We’ll be all right, but I’ve booby-trapped the cabinet with a water glass for advance warning.”

  “The lock works, you know. Who could get past it?”

  Buddy stared at her. Where and how to begin the story of the Camp Kateri massacre? Or the murder of Nan Sawyer? But then he heard Ben’s approaching footsteps. He said, “We can talk it through after dinner.”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “All right, Buddy. But I’m trusting you on this.”

  “I know. And I won’t let you down.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Are you Chinese?” Ben asked as he finished dinner.

  Mei took a sip from the tumbler of Jack Daniel’s over ice that stood next to her water glass. She raised an eyebrow. “I’m American,” she told him. “My parents are also American, but they adopted me when I was six months old. Before that I lived in an orphanage in Beijing.”

  Ben lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Would you tell me how to spell your name?”

  “M-E-I. But it’s pronounced ‘May,’ like the fifth month of the year.”

  He nodded yet appeared regretful. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Ben. It’s good that you’re inquisitive.”

  “My mother always thought . . .” His voice faltered. “My mother . . .”

  But he couldn’t speak. He stared at Buddy and Mei in turn through wet eyes.

  Mei pushed back her chair, walked around the table, and stood behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder.

  Leaning away from her, he said, “You’re not my mother.”

  She knelt and looked up at him. “I can’t be your mother. But I’m glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Ben turned to her. He began to cry.

  “It’s all right,” she told him, again putting her hand on his shoulder.

  He shook his head, but he didn’t pull away.

  She said, “Why don’t we turn in for the night? If you’d like, I can read to you, stay with you for a while.”

  At first he didn’t respond. Then, slowly, he got up.

  She led him into the hallway to the bedrooms. Buddy thought Mei had handled the difficult moment far better than he could.

  His reverie ended when his mobile phone rang. He pulled it from the breast pocket of his suit coat. “Lock here.”

  “Chief Malone.”

  “Hi, Chief.”

  “Everything okay with the boy?”

  “Yeah. No problems.”

  Malone said, “I need you to come out tonight.”

  Buddy felt himself tense. He said, “That’s not a good idea. Ben would be unprotected. And my girlfriend.”

  Earlier he’d told the chief that he’d take care of Ben for three nights. The chief knew this was a violation of many rules, but as a favor to Buddy he’d agreed to call the boy’s stay with Buddy and Mei “police custody.”

  “I’m sending two street cops to guard them,” Malone said. “But you’re coming up to East Seventy-Ninth Street. It’s just a few blocks from where you are.”

  Buddy paused. He was tired and didn’t want to leave Mei and Ben alone, no matter how many cops were posted around the building at street level. “Orders are orders, Chief. But are you sure about this?”

  Chief Malone grunted. “We have a bigger problem than the boy. How many branches of the Brook family are left?”

  Buddy thought of Bruno, Carl, and Dietrich, the remaining of Walter Brook’s four sons. He said, “Three branches.”

  “Wrong. After tonight, there are two, plus the boy.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Was it a hatchet?” Buddy asked.

  He and Chief Malone climbed the stairs from the first to the second floor of Bruno Brook’s palatial town house. On the walls lining the ten-foot-wide staircase hung large paintings and tapestries with scenes of battles featuring castles, rivers, cavalry. A Persian runner covered most of the staircase’s treads, and the polished mahogany banister was at least eight inches wide.

  Despite Malone’s having waited for Buddy outside, where the temp was fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, sweat covered his domed forehead. The big chief seemed to boil over with anxiety and frustration. His face was redder than usual, his tie looser. Buddy wondered how often Malone entered a town house like this one, which Buddy guessed was worth $50 or $60 million.

  Malo
ne panted and grunted as he said, “Not as bloody as a hatchet, but effective as hell. Their housekeeper discovered them and went into shock.”

  Buddy’s nerves jangled at this information. He said, “No sign of forced entry at any of the doors?”

  Malone shook his head. “None. And no picked locks. First thing we checked. Security system was off, too. Nobody tripped the alarm.”

  Buddy said, “The killer was invited in?”

  “Probably. Either known to the family or a delivery person or some such.”

  Known to the family, Buddy thought. Or maybe a family member.

  Similar to the situation at Camp Kateri.

  On the second floor they walked into a hive of activity. CSU was on-site. They wore navy-blue windbreakers and blue booties over their feet. He saw they’d set up bright lights on stands, and knew their first task would be creating a photographic record—before anything was examined, touched, or moved. They’d begin with photographs taken from each corner of the room toward the center.

  He and Malone slipped booties over their shoes and latex gloves over their hands.

  “This way,” Malone said, and led Buddy down a wide hallway on the building’s north–south axis. Malone gave him the names and ages of the children.

  As they entered the master bedroom, they could see the bright lights brought in by CSU. The team noticed Malone, and they backed off so he and Buddy could pass through to the bathroom. The chief stopped at the open doorway. Buddy looked over his shoulder.

  He saw one CSU detective taking video of the scene. Another detective was drawing the scene on a sketch pad, using a tape measure to record on the drawing the distance from each body and piece of evidence to a wall, bathtub, or other reference point. A third detective would take photos: panoramic, middle-range, close-up.

  Malone growled, “Everyone out of here.”

  Two members of CSU filed out of the master bath. When the room was clear, Malone extended an index finger and pointed once at Buddy and once toward the doorway.

  All day he’d felt worse and worse. First the dried gore at Camp Kateri. Then Nan Sawyer.

  Now an entire family.

  His heart raced. His hands grew damp in the latex gloves. He felt light-headed, but he couldn’t sit down or show weakness. Not with the chief so close to him.

  He coughed twice, into his arm, buying time to settle down.

  Then, slowly, reluctantly, he walked through the French doors and stood on the gray-and-white marble tile.

  Four bodies lay at the other end of the enormous bathroom that included a daybed and a wall-mounted television that was switched off.

  Lucy—sixteen years old, dark hair, attractive—seemed to be reaching for the daybed covered in gray suede. She lay on the floor, her wide-open eyes rimmed with blood and staring up at him. Her lips were caked with vomit and white mucus that also was spewed onto the marble near her head. She had no visible bruises.

  Bruno, Natalie, and their son William, age seventeen, with a goatee, were dressed casually, except for Natalie, who wore a pink bathrobe. They lay in the far corner, near the vanity.

  Buddy sniffed the air. He couldn’t smell anything and guessed the family had been injected or made to drink poisoned food or water. He went over to the bathtub and looked down.

  Empty. But perhaps Natalie had been getting ready for a bath. He looked over at her and saw that the robe barely covered her torso. She’d been beautiful, and her body showed no visible marks of struggle. Except for the same blood-red eyes and the vomit and mucus on and around the mouth.

  Buddy walked around the gray daybed to the girl. He squatted next to her and looked carefully at her skin. No visible puncture wounds or marks from a needle. A slender river of redness, like syrup, running from her ears.

  He took a deep breath, stood, and turned to Malone, who’d remained in the doorway. “Cause of death?”

  “Poison. Or gas.”

  Buddy pointed to the corner. “There’s a radiator. Where would the gas come from? Not from the stove all the way down in the kitchen.”

  “CSU set up their mobile lab in the living room downstairs. They found traces of a powder in the bathtub.”

  Buddy said, “Stuff for a bubble bath?”

  “Maybe.”

  Buddy returned to the bathroom doorway, Malone behind him, and faced the CSU team in the bedroom. He addressed all of them. “Time of death?”

  “Five to six p.m.,” a young man said. He wore thick green eyeglasses and a black turtleneck sweater under his windbreaker.

  Buddy said, “Two hours ago?”

  “More or less.”

  “Track marks? Anything to indicate use of a syringe?”

  “No.”

  “Administered orally?”

  “Possibly. We’ll wait for the results of the toxicology screen.”

  He turned from the CSU detective and returned to the master bath, Malone a step behind him. Standing there quietly, he thought the bodies were perfect statues, pale under the bright lights of the laboratory the room had become. Strangely peaceful now, but their deaths had been wrenching torture.

  A commotion in the adjoining bedroom pulled at his attention. Soon one of the CSU team, a guy about fifty, entered the bathroom. He had graying black hair and clear plastic goggles over brown eyes. His mouth was covered by a surgical mask.

  “Detective, please come out of the bathroom,” the man said, his voice high-pitched with excitement. “You, too, Chief.”

  “Why?” Buddy asked.

  “There could be gas in the air. It might not kill you at this point, but it might damage your lungs or heart. Please. Come with me.”

  The CSU guy rushed Buddy and Chief Malone into the master bedroom.

  “Farther away,” the man with the surgical mask told them, pointing out to the hallway. “Let’s go downstairs, away from the bathtub.”

  The group hurried along the hallway and down the enormous staircase, Chief Malone and the man from CSU bringing up the rear. As if they’d made a plan, they gathered with several other members of the CSU team in the grand foyer. There, the functional casement windows had been cranked open.

  Buddy felt desperate to get outside, into the frigid air, away from the scene of death—the third one today. His stomach frothed.

  He looked at his watch: 8:30 p.m. Focusing on the guy from CSU, he said, “What’s your name?”

  The man removed his mask. “I’m Detective Gonzalez.”

  “Tell us what you’ve found.”

  The man stared. “We need to be sure the murder weapon remains confidential. If it gets online or into the Gazette or the Times, we’ll have a real problem.”

  Malone pointed at the man. “Tell us now. Is it bubonic plague or something?”

  “Nothing like that,” Gonzalez snapped, his hair shiny under the recessed lights. “Now, are we agreed the cause of death doesn’t go beyond the people in this room?”

  Buddy nodded, as did the others.

  “Okay,” Gonzalez said, relaxing a little. “What we found in the bathtub are remnants of hydrogen cyanide. When pellets of the product the killer used are exposed to air, they vaporize into gas and the cyanide component is released. At the right concentration, it kills everyone who breathes it, and it takes a couple of minutes to fifteen or twenty.” After this explanation, Gonzalez looked at each of them, as if they were certain to grasp his meaning.

  Chief Malone said, “So the murder weapon is cyanide gas. The killer must have some background in chemistry or taken some science classes. So what? Why should it be confidential?”

  Gonzalez stiffened once again and glared. He didn’t blink. His mouth crimped on one side, as if they’d disappointed him. “It wasn’t just cyanide gas,” he explained. “It was mixed with a stabilizer to prevent further reactions, as well as . . .”

  “Come on!” Chief Malone interrupted. “Speak English, okay? What do we need to know?”

  Gonzalez was silent for a moment, his face purple from the wa
y Malone had shut him up. “You need to know, Chief Malone,” the man said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “the killer used a gas called Zyklon B.”

  Two members of the CSU team gasped. Malone’s faced showed only puzzlement.

  Buddy thought he’d heard the term before but wasn’t sure where. At this point he didn’t mind admitting he was lost. He asked, “What’s Zyklon B?”

  Gonzalez turned to him. “It’s what the Nazis used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Buddy turned from the small group and walked off by himself. He ignored the activity around him. He needed to think, needed to make order out of confusion.

  First a hatchet.

  Now Zyklon B.

  Strange ways to kill, unless . . .

  He put his hands together and absently studied the lines of his skin, the single small mole on the back of his left hand.

  He thought the killer was confident, even arrogant. But more importantly, the killer was making a point.

  But what was it?

  Buddy wondered where the Brook family had come from. He thought maybe, long ago, the Brooks had participated in the Holocaust—the ultimate crime—and now someone was taking revenge.

  He separated his hands and turned them over. His palms were large and ugly, he thought. Muscular, unrefined, blocklike. As he looked, he thought of two possible killers, one who used a hatchet and was motivated by money or love gone bad. And a second killer who wanted revenge for a nearly century-old crime.

  He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, forced his mind back to the facts. To the scene here at Bruno’s town house. The deaths upstairs were the obvious things, he decided. But there was something else—something like a hidden musical note. It was so faint he was sure nobody else heard it. He tried to block out the commotion and focus on that muted sound.

  Standing in the foyer, he imagined the events of earlier that evening.

  Someone had gotten into the house, or been invited in, then forced the family upstairs and into the bathroom. How do you make a family go upstairs? he asked himself.

  Threats backed up by violence.