“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. We’ll get together later tonight and compare notes.”
Gordon straightened up and let Jones drive away. He turned to look down the street and saw that in the time he had been gone, the crime scene technicians had been busy; Isabelle’s car was gone, as was her body, and someone had washed away her blood, leaving only a wet patch on the sidewalk where she had died. The residents of the ground floor apartment were working to board up their windows and didn’t pay the slightest attention to Gordon as he entered the building. He went upstairs without delay, heading straight for his apartment. After passing through the corridor to his office, he crossed to his desk and sat down heavily, staring blankly at the computer screen. He glanced left at his unmade bed, which brought memories of the exciting final night he and Isabelle had shared. The memories were flooding into his brain and stabbing painfully at his heart.
“Stay and wait for my call.” Gordon repeated and paraphrased from his conversation with Jones. He looked at the time and saw it was a little after two. Where had the time had gone since he woke up beside Isabelle and now? Gordon couldn’t say. He thought about the bottle in his drawer, the others in his kitchen and the sweet oblivion he would find in a drunken stupor, and was sorely tempted to start drinking. This desire brought back the memory of Isabelle’s face and her struggle to speak; she had desperately wanted Gordon to promise he would solve the case and bring justice for her and Millie. He was certain that was what she wanted, so that was what he had promised her in her final seconds of life. Gordon sat forward and turned on his computer to look through the information he had saved until he found Derek’s address. Jones was his closest friend, but Gordon couldn’t sit back and let him take over. He retrieved his gun and lock-pick from the drawer and, standing, headed straight out of the apartment without looking back.
Gordon drove across the city to where Derek lived, cruising through the streets to get a close look at the upmarket district Derek called home. He drove slowly, but not enough to arouse suspicion; there were luxurious houses with expansive lawns and the trappings one would expect to find in an affluent, upper class region. Gordon didn’t see many people; an elderly woman tending her garden, a tall, muscular man working in his garage - normal people doing ordinary things that didn’t concern Gordon in the slightest. He passed by Derek’s home, observing it was built on a slope. It looked like the others and offered little in the way of cover if he wanted to lurk and wait for Derek to come home. He briefly considered breaking in and waiting for him, but the house was owned by his father and both of them were in the security business. Gordon could only assume there would be an alarm and a code required, to prevent a call to whoever was in charge of security, probably his own company, after he had gained entry, which Gordon didn’t possess. Waiting for Derek wasn’t a good idea either, as that would bring his security personnel into the equation. Gordon drove away, parking a couple of blocks down to prevent any chance of his car being seen. A thought occurred to him, however, that led to a loose collection of impulses that could serve as a plan. It wasn’t an exceptionally good idea, but it was all he had. If it failed, then he would have to be a little more direct and if it came to that, he was glad he had brought his gun.
Night came. Jones had called him on his cell phone a couple of hours before darkness fell informing Gordon he’d managed to assume control of Isabelle’s investigation - despite Jenkins’ protests. He was going to make sure Millie’s death was looked into again as part of the enquiry and had plans to speak with Derek in the morning. There was some stonewalling going on - on Leland Security’s behalf - and Jones needed a little more time. Gordon told him it was fine and mentioned he was going to look into a few things on his own and would call if anything came of them. Jones wanted to know more, but Gordon didn’t elaborate.
It was after ten when Derek arrived home. He was driving himself and followed closely by his bodyguards. Gordon was still lingering in his car as far down the street as he could, but had latterly tucked it around the corner of the nearby intersection, and was able to see them only because the house on the corner had no hedge to obscure his vision. After a further hour, Gordon set his plan in motion. He called the emergency service on a burn phone he kept in his glove compartment and told them to send the police to a suspicious car as he was sure the two male occupants had guns.
The police arrived in a better response time than Gordon could’ve imagined for any other part of the city. He tried not to draw conclusions from this, and simply exited his car. He heard aggressive calls for the men in to exit their vehicle. He watched and waited, looking on as the guards stepped out of their SUV and placed their hands on the roof to be searched. As soon as their weapons were found, they were handcuffed and placed in the back of the patrol car while their license and purpose for being in the street was confirmed. Gordon knew he didn’t have long, so he walked calmly but briskly to Derek’s home. Fortunately, to the best of his observation, the two in the back of the car didn’t see Gordon standing at Derek’s front door as they were too wrapped up in their own problems.
Gordon hammered on the door, then surreptitiously drew his weapon. Derek answered and looked first at Gordon’s face and then down at the gun in his hand.
“We need to talk.” Gordon told him simply. Derek nodded and stepped aside, allowing Gordon to enter. Gordon shut the door behind him and gestured for Derek to go into the room on the left. The hall was spacious, with beige carpeting and white walls. A wide staircase led up to the second floor, which was probably as equally bland and lacking in ornamentation as the ground floor.
“Close the curtains.” Gordon instructed, and Derek complied. He had gone into the living room, which owned a large television: various other electronics, an L-shaped sofa with a pair of matching armchairs and a small cabinet housing knick knacks. Gordon gestured with the gun to inform Derek he should sit on one of the chairs and sat on the other one himself.
“Are you planning to shoot me?” Derek asked, surprisingly calm given his situation.
“I’m not planning on it at the moment. Let’s play it by ear.” Gordon responded.
“Honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t care if you did.”
“I think that would depend on where I started shooting.” Gordon returned ominously. Derek lounged back in his chair.
“I don’t suppose you could get me a drink before we get started?” Derek asked.
“Do you know what happened today?” Gordon asked, ignoring his question.
“Yes.”
“Isabelle Reese-Smyth was gunned down.”
“It’s a tragedy.” Derek responded blankly.
“Careful with your tone.”
“No, I mean it. I never met her but Millie talked about her. She sounded like a great mom; she lived for her daughter and supported her through everything she did. Maybe if my mother was still alive, and she loved me as much as Isabelle loved Millie, then things would’ve been different.”
“That’s quite the sob story.” Gordon commented dryly. There had been some talk about how Harold’s wife had died, but it was before Gordon’s time and he had never thought there was much point in finding out more.
“What do you want, Mister Crane?”
“I want to know if you killed Millie. I want to know just how much you know about her disappearance and death, as well as the deaths of a half dozen other women. I need to know because they won’t do anything to you without proof, and whoever killed Millie and those other women was very, very careful about making sure there was no evidence left behind. So, let’s talk. I’m certain you know more than you’ve told me, and with God as my witness, before I leave here you’re going to tell me everything.” Gordon explained coldly, calmly and quietly. Derek’s demeanour betrayed the fear he felt looking into the hard, frightening visage of the detective.
“Okay.” He responded meekly.
“At some point we’re going to be interrupted by police officers who’ve
detained your security. You’re going to tell them you don’t feel safe with those men in the street and you want them to be removed. That’ll buy us the time we need to talk. If you don’t do this, if you tell the police that I’m here, then I’ll flash my old credentials, use my contacts and the end result will be that you and I are left alone anyway. The only difference is that I’ll be far more angry than I am right now… and believe me, I’m very, very angry.”
Derek swallowed and nodded slowly. Gordon didn’t ask any more questions, simply resting the gun against his leg while they waited for the inevitable knock on the door from the police. When it came, Derek did as he was told; he answered it, acting as calm and collected as any law abiding citizen should, and informed the officers he didn’t want them outside. Satisfied, the officer assured him the two men would be removed forthwith and left. Derek closed the door and returned to the living room, but before he retraced his steps to the chair, he pointed at the bottle of alcohol on the sideboard. Gordon shrugged and Derek retrieved it, placing it on the coffee table with two glasses before sitting on the sofa behind it. He was closer to Gordon but not within any kind of range to do something reckless with the bottle. However, he simply poured two measures, more than the usual two fingers worth, of whiskey into each glass, then slid one towards Gordon, taking up the other for himself.
Gordon reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. After setting it to record and doing the usual preamble before a recording, he put it down on the table beside his glass. Derek no longer seemed afraid of him, but was clearly concerned about something. Nonetheless, he gave his verbal consent to recording their conversation on the tape.
“Let’s start with what happened in university.” Gordon stated.
“I told the truth about Millie and me; we were just friends. We never slept together, hell, that was never even a consideration.”
“Why not?”
“Because of why she was helping me. Before I tell you that, I need to tell you something else, something I only ever told one other person.”
“And that is?”
“I’m gay.” Derek declared. He said it with an air of someone who expected this to shock or surprise, but Gordon wasn’t fazed in the slightest.
“So?” Gordon questioned.
“So I’m guessing you don’t know my father’s feelings on the subject. And why would you; I doubt it’s something he’d advertise, even to his friends.”
A flicker of understanding started to appear in Gordon’s mind, but he pressed on with his questions.
“So, Millie was helping you what, come out to your father?”
“Oh, no. My father is highly aware and doesn’t approve in the slightest.”
“Families have gotten through worse.”
“Not ones with people like my father.”
“Tell me from the beginning.” Gordon instructed. Derek sipped at his drink and nodded.
“When I went to university it was like a whole new world opened up to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’d suspected since I was a teenager that I wasn’t attracted to women, but Dad didn’t appreciate it so I never really explored that side of me. I was excited because I figured there, in university, I could finally be myself without worrying about what he’d do to me.”
Gordon caught the term of phrase Derek latterly used, but didn’t interrupt.
“But I was wracked with nerves. You see, I wasn’t sure if that was really who I was. I tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with some of the other gay men I found there but I was never able to go through with it. It may sound silly to you, Mister Crane, but I was having a real crisis over my identity.”
It didn’t, but again, Gordon said nothing.
“And then I became friends with Millie and I sort of found my place. I know everyone thinks I was hanging around the group because I was in love with Millie, and that’s true up to a point, but not in the way people thought.”
“You loved her like a sister?”
“Precisely. She was helping me understand who I was and she made me feel completely safe while doing so.” Derek suddenly smiled and let out a very short chuckle. “She even offered to be my wingman and help me find someone nice.”
“But I’m guessing something went wrong.”
“My father has friends everywhere; I call them spies, but he calls them friends. I received a phone call from him and, basically, he threatened me with violence if I didn’t stop my ‘embarrassing behaviour’. So that was that. Millie couldn’t understand why I just capitulated; no one can understand, unless they’ve seen my father behind closed doors.”
“So, from what I’ve learned, I’m guessing you made Millie promise to keep your secret and probably stopped looking for a partner?”
“Yes. That’s why we were in her room the night Josh called unexpectedly. She was consoling me but at the same time, trying to get me to agree to take her along to meet my father so I could explain my position and let him know who I was. She really believed that if she was there she could help me persuade him to let me live my life the way I wanted to.”
“And that’s when Josh caught you and…”
“Got the wrong idea. Millie, God bless her, held true to her word - even though it cost her the man she loved; though I think she would’ve been better off in the long run had she lived. She wouldn’t tell Josh why she and I were alone in what he claimed was a compromising situation, and later, if anyone didn’t believe we were innocent of his allegations, well, she didn’t care.”
“But it didn’t end there.”
“No, it didn’t. It impacted on our friendship because I sort of withdrew. I kept in touch with her only because she’d been so loyal to me that it seemed wrong to cut contact with her, but every now and then she would suggest talking to my father. I… I never told her why that was impossible. Perhaps if I had she would’ve let it lie.”
“You’re going to have to tell me.” Gordon told him flatly. Derek finished his drink and poured another.
“How much do you know about my mother’s death?” Derek asked. Gordon wasn’t sure if he was attempting to change the topic or if this was related so he decided to let it play out.
“An accident of some sort.”
“You could call it that. You see, my father was very, very good at abusing us; never enough that we’d have broken bones, and never enough that there’d be marks that couldn’t be easily, logically explained. It wasn’t just physical either. The psychological abuse that was… well, in some ways that was as bad as when he hurt us. He’d get worse and worse, attacking my mother and me until we were even afraid to look in his direction, and then he’d take one of his trips and when he came back, we’d have a few days of peace. We never knew what he did on those trips, just that he was out of the house for a night or two. Then one time he changed his mind and said he’d decided not to take a trip after all. The beatings stopped for a while and it seemed as though life might be going to change. Then one weekend my mother accidentally slipped and cracked her head on the bathtub. I realized then that the only reason he’d stopped being violent was so that any evidence that might implicate him would have the chance to heal before he murdered her. The violence against me subsided a little after her death, but those trips he’d take became a little more regular; three maybe four times a year instead of two. He’d tell me that if I ever tried to run away then I’d have a little accident of my own, just like Mom did.” Derek concluded bitterly.
The story sent a chill down Gordon’s spine as everything began to slip into focus. He glanced at the pictures on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, the only personal items in the room, and saw one that was almost certainly a family photo. On the left was Harold, in the middle, and perhaps no more than ten or twelve, was Derek, and on the right was a stunningly beautiful, blonde woman, likely his mother. As he looked, Gordon couldn’t help but observe a resemblance between Derek’s mother and Millie.
“How many trips has your father taken?” Gordon wanted to know.
>
“A lot.”
Gordon realized there were more victims than he imagined. Harold had been a cop; he’d known everything he needed to do in order to cover his tracks. Picking the right victim, preparing the kill room and ensuring there was no evidence left behind to throw suspicion his way… it was possible. That also meant he had been killing women right under everyone’s nose for years, a proclivity it seemed he was still partial to.
“You got into an argument with Millie a few days before she died. What was it about?” Gordon demanded.
“She was desperate to settle things between my father and me so that she could make her peace with Josh. She knew he and Tamsin were sleeping together and she was happy for them, even joking that she hoped they’d tell her soon because she didn’t like the awkwardness that came when Tamsin received a text from him while they were hanging out.”
“How did she find out?”
“She accidentally picked up Tamsin’s phone one time instead of her own. But she pretended not to know to make them happy.”
“So, what did you and she argue about?”
“She arranged a meeting between her, my father and me, and went behind my back to do it. She told him it was important the three of us speak together. I don’t know what he told her specifically, other than he agreed to the meeting. I told her I wouldn’t go and I was going to cancel. She got really angry with me and said if I wasn’t going to go through with it then she’d have to break contact with me. And that was that.”
“So, the day she went missing…” Gordon trailed off.
“She wasn’t meeting me. She thought she was, but she wasn’t.”
Gordon took the glass and sipped at the drink, swallowing the strong alcohol as he prepared to have the final piece of the puzzle laid out before him.
“You’re going to need to explain that.”
“My father sent her a text message from my phone telling her I agreed to the meeting and he’d arranged to have a car pick her up. Between then and when I saw her next I can only assume she thought everything was okay. She was taken to my father’s home and joined us there. Before she arrived I’d begged and pleaded with my father to leave her alone, to leave her out of whatever sick game he had planned. He assured me he was only interested in what she had to say.” Derek said. His hands began to tremble and his eyes welled up with tears.
His Twisted Smile Page 17
