Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  Which only served to remind me that breakfast was still on my agenda.

  ________

  We arrived at room 153 just as a tousled-haired, medium-frame doctor was exiting it, easing the door gently shut behind him. He appeared to be about my age. Lean. A brisk intensity about him. Tom Cruise–ish features. Almost as much scruff as I had.

  “Kevin?” Sharyn gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “I know the boy’s parents. His dad’s the ME.” He appraised her, then me. “I heard about what happened and pulled some strings so I could be the attending physician. I didn’t know you were working this case.”

  “And I didn’t know you were on call today. Where’s Olivia?”

  “She’s at that Princess Ballerina Camp. Ballet for seven-year-olds every morning this week. We talked about it.”

  “Yes. And we agreed that if she went, you would stay close to the studio in case she needed anything.”

  “She’s fine, Sharyn.”

  Even without introductions, it was pretty clear this guy was Olivia’s father, Sharyn’s ex.

  “I’m Patrick Bowers.” I extended a hand to him. “I’m working with Sharyn.”

  “The Patrick Bowers?”

  The question caught me off guard and I wasn’t really sure how to answer it. “Well, I’m . . .”

  “The one who used to date Sharyn?”

  “Kevin,” she said. “That’s not an appropriate thing to—”

  “I’m just trying to establish who I’m talking with here.”

  “Yes.” I lowered my hand. “That’s who I am. And yes, we used to date.”

  “Well, I’m Dr. Gordon and I used to be her husband.”

  “Okay.”

  “Before our divorce.”

  “Kevin!” Sharyn protested. “Enough.”

  If his last name was Gordon, Sharyn must have kept—or gone back to—her own name.

  Now it was his turn to offer a handshake.

  I accepted.

  His grip was knuckle-crunchingly firm, so I reciprocated with just as much pressure.

  It’s all part of the unspoken code of the handshake: too limp a grip and you’ll appear weak, but squeeze too hard and you’ll come across as desperate to prove yourself.

  However, in Kevin’s case, I got the impression that he was used to being the guy in charge, and used to letting other people know it.

  By my grip I let him know that that was no longer the case here.

  I let go.

  “I heard about the homicide,” he said, addressing Sharyn now, rather than me. “You don’t really think Canyon had something to do with it?”

  “You know I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation with you, Kevin.”

  When he responded, his words turned icier, his way of reiterating that although we might be FBI agents, here at the hospital we were on his turf. “Canyon shouldn’t be seeing visitors yet.”

  “Well, then.” Sharyn edged in and took hold of the door handle. “We’ll be sure to pass that along if anyone shows up while we’re in there.”

  He’d thrown down the gauntlet.

  She’d picked it up.

  Kevin worked his jaw back and forth stiffly a couple of times before backing up. “Don’t upset him, Sharyn. He’s been through a lot. That boy doesn’t need any more trauma.”

  He gave me a stern glance. “Bowers.”

  “It was good to meet you too, Doctor,” I told him.

  After consulting his clipboard briefly, he strode down the hall toward the café. Sharyn just shook her head and gave an aggravated sigh, then edged the door open and the two of us stepped into the muted light of Canyon Robbins’s hospital room.

  26

  Canyon lay propped up in bed, scrolling on his phone. “Whatcha need now?” he said impatiently, without looking our way. He must not have heard our conversation outside the door and thought his doctor had returned.

  “Canyon, I’m Agent Bowers with the FBI,” I said. “This is Agent Weist. We have a few questions regarding what happened in the house on Runyon Street.”

  The eye contact he made with me was brief and fleeting, but once his eyes locked onto Sharyn, his attention became quite focused indeed.

  Back in the days when we were dating, I’d sometimes wondered if Sharyn had any idea how much power she had over men. Her work as a model had taught her how to catch someone’s eye and hold his gaze with a quiet confidence, an air of mystery, and a touch of seduction. That, combined with her stunning natural beauty, was a pretty potent combination for guys, at least the straight ones.

  It didn’t matter that Canyon was half her age. Beauty is beauty.

  He laid down the phone on the pivoting shelf in front of him and swung it to the side. Then he shifted slightly, trying to scootch himself up a little more, but almost immediately grimaced, stopped, and closed his eyes, drawing in a long, tight breath.

  “Are you alright?” I asked, realizing immediately that, given the circumstances, it could be construed as a rather ludicrous question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you need us to get you anything?” Sharyn offered.

  “No.” He opened his eyes. Peered at her. “I’m good.”

  “Sure?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you look like you’re recovering remarkably well. From what I was told, that was quite a serious wound.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. They told me I coulda died.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing better.”

  “Me too.”

  She took out a pen and a flip notepad, but I knew how good her memory was. The notebook was just for show.

  “Canyon,” I said, “your friends told us that Igazi suggested you use that particular house.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Before yesterday, had you ever been in it before?”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. He just said it’d be a good place.”

  “For?”

  “Pranking Erik.”

  Sharyn jotted something down. “Do you know why he thought it would be good for that?”

  “I guess just ’cause it’s empty and has a creepy basement. Not too many cops visit that block. I don’t know. They found a body upstairs, though, right? A woman?”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “I mean, nothin’. I didn’t even hear about it ’til I read Mimi’s texts this morning.” He hushed his voice. “How’d she die? What happened?”

  “We’re still determining that,” I said.

  “I heard she was shot.”

  “Did Mimi tell you that?”

  “I read it online. There’s this forum.”

  “What forum?”

  “One of the threads from TypeKnot.”

  I gestured toward his phone. “Show me the site.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  Sharyn handed him his cell. “Who left the graffiti in the living room?”

  “I don’t know.” He was scrolling to the forum. “That was on the wall when I got there.”

  “You mean when you arrived last night with Erik?”

  “No. I went there earlier, just by myself.” He found the site and passed the phone to me, but as he continued his explanation he was looking at Sharyn. “You know, to check out the place before the girls showed up.”

  “I need to look up a few things on your phone,” I said. “Your contacts and messages. Do you give me permission to do that?”

  “I guess. Yeah. Sure.”

  I studied the TypeKnot thread as Sharyn asked him, “Did you check out the upstairs too?”

  “Uh-uh. Just the basement. When Mimi and Gwen came in, they lit the candles, set everything up. We were just messing with Erik, you know. We thought it’d be funny. He didn’t mean to stab
me. I know he didn’t.”

  “I understand.”

  “Is he gonna get in trouble? I don’t want him to go to jail. I didn’t . . . It was just an accident.”

  “That’s all still being sorted out,” she replied. “Today, we’re here to learn what we can about the woman who was found upstairs. Does the name ‘Jamika Karon’ mean anything to you?”

  “Is that . . . was that her name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, I didn’t know her. I swear.”

  While I scrolled through the forum, I located an exchange where people voted on how they thought the victim had been killed. Right now, 51% had voted for shot, 28% strangled, 12% stabbed, 9% other.

  Under “other,” quite a few graphic suggestions were given.

  I forwarded the link to my phone.

  “Let’s get back to Igazi for a second,” Sharyn said to Canyon. “Is that his real name?”

  “It’s what he goes by. I’ve never heard him use any other name.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We hang out a little. That’s it. That’s all.”

  “Describe him for me. Is he Black? White? Chaldean?”

  Her question about Igazi being Chaldean would’ve taken me by surprise if I hadn’t read in the case files that there was a sizable Arab population living in the Detroit area. Chaldeans were a subgroup of Arabs who were ethnically Christian rather than Muslim—if you can really be any religion just by birth and culture rather than commitment and will, something that I personally doubted.

  “He’s white and old. Like maybe a little younger than you. Wait—I didn’t mean you’re, like, old old.”

  “I understand. Facial hair? Tattoos? Scars?”

  “No beard or anything. Black hair. I don’t know about scars or tattoos. I never saw any.” His demeanor had changed—longer pauses, less eye contact, more fidgeting, and I wondered if he was really giving us the truth.

  “What about height?”

  “Not as big as me, but he’s tough. Looks like he works out a lot. Yeah. Kinda skinny, but super strong. Does parkour.”

  The parkour angle could explain the agility of the suspect yesterday and how he was able to walk away after falling to the gym floor. And a medium-framed, wiry, athletic man did fit the description of the person I’d fought in the attic.

  The guy who now had my gun.

  “Where can we find him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you get in touch with him when you want to hang out?”

  “Mostly through TypeKnot. It keeps the numbers private.”

  Though I’d seen Tessa using the app, I’d never downloaded it myself. It was one of the newer social networking apps that was particularly popular with teens.

  I opened Canyon’s TypeKnot app. “What’s his screen name?”

  “Bloodbrother13.”

  I found it, took a screenshot of the image, then sent it, along with the user’s profile, to my phone.

  “Have you heard from him since yesterday?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  I checked Canyon’s contacts as well as his recent text and email messages and social networking apps but found no mention of Igazi’s name. His texts were deleted. At the moment I didn’t have a way to clone Canyon’s phone, but I was able to upload the links, profile pages, and even the address book to mine.

  “Do you have his picture?” I asked Canyon.

  “No.”

  Thinking I might have missed something, I held up his cell. “Is his contact info on here anywhere?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Just through TypeKnot.”

  “I understand he’s a street artist.”

  “Graffiti? Sure, yeah, he does some tagging.” Canyon was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together worriedly. “Look, we didn’t do nothin’. I didn’t kill anyone. None of us did. We didn’t even know anyone was dead. We never would’ve gone in that house if we knew she was there.”

  When Sharyn replied, she found a way to be compassionate but firm. “No one is accusing you or your friends of killing anyone. We just want answers. Over the past few months there’ve been a number of other bodies found in abandoned houses like that one on Runyon Street. Maybe you’ve heard about them on the news?”

  He shrugged noncommittally.

  “Canyon, do you know anything about those murders?”

  I noticed that she went for the more provocative term—“murders” rather than “crimes”—perhaps to gauge his response.

  “No,” he told her.

  “Are you the one who reported those bodies to the police?”

  “What? No way!”

  “Do you have any idea who might have? Maybe Igazi? Could he have known about them and told the police?”

  “No. Uh-uh,” he emphasized. “I’m telling you, seriously, it wasn’t any of us.”

  I asked him, “Do you know of any reason why Igazi would have suggested that you use that house last night in particular?”

  “Actually, we were gonna go today, but Gwen couldn’t ’cause of a swim club meet or something. That’s why we switched it to last night.”

  Hmm.

  “When did you change your plans?”

  “I don’t know. At like five, right before we headed to the house.”

  “And did Igazi know?”

  He shook his head. “I never told him.”

  Interesting.

  I finished with his phone and laid it on the shelf by the bed. “Did you see anyone else around that house while you were there either time?”

  “Uh-uh. I never saw anyone.”

  I had nothing more at the moment.

  Sharyn closed things up by saying, “Canyon, can you think of anything else that you might’ve seen or heard that could help us learn what happened to that woman?”

  “No. Seriously. I wish I could help you more.”

  “Alright. Thank you.” She put her notepad away and took out a business card. She scribbled her phone number on the back of it and handed it to him, just as she’d done with the other kids last night. “If you think of anything else, call me, alright? That’s my cell number.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  ++++

  Canyon Robbins waited for them to leave his hospital room, waited until the sound of their footsteps began to get soft as they walked down the hall, then went to TypeKnot and sent the message to the person who’d told him about the house: They know.

  The reply came almost immediately: Who? Cops?

  FBI. They’re asking about last night.

  What’d you tell em?

  Nothin.

  You sure?

  Yah! What should I do if they come back?

  Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. I’ll look into it.

  I’m done. I’m out.

  Canyon waited, but when no reply came through, he sent another message: Seriously. I’m not gonna go to jail over a few drugs.

  Then the reply: Jail is not what you need to be worrying about right now.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  He waited, staring anxiously at the screen, his hands trembling slightly, but nothing more came through.

  This person was not someone Canyon wanted to screw with or get on the wrong side of.

  No.

  Not at all.

  Not considering what the person had done—and was capable of doing.

  After reading that last message about what he should or should not be afraid of, Canyon wanted to run, to hide, and he would have, except he was stuck here because of the stab wound.

  Which, come to think of it, really was starting to hurt.

  For a moment, he thought about calling that hot FBI agent, or even contacting his dad for help, but then he r
emembered what the person who’d shown him the house and sold him the Oxycodone had said would happen to his father and mother if he told.

  Canyon deleted TypeKnot and removed all the data files associated with it from his phone.

  Then he did something he hadn’t done since he was a kid and his dad took him to Sunday school at the Mormon church where he was an elder. Canyon Robbins prayed.

  27

  As we passed through the hall, I asked Sharyn what she thought about our interview with Canyon.

  “That boy knows more than he’s telling us,” she said.

  “I agree. His baseline shifted when he started sharing things we couldn’t have verified.”

  “Also, the timing of when Igazi sent those other kids to that house is just too convenient. We really need to find him.”

  “You just read my mind, Sharyn.”

  “I’m glad I haven’t lost it after all these years.”

  From what we knew, it certainly seemed as if Igazi was trying to set up those kids to be present at the house at the very time when the anonymous tip about the body’s location would’ve been sent in.

  But they went a day early.

  The guy came back to carve into Jamika’s forehead. That’s why he was there at the site of the crime.

  “There weren’t any texts on Canyon’s phone,” I said. “But he mentioned he’d received texts from Mimi this morning.”

  “A teenager who has deleted all of his texts? Why would you do that unless you had something to hide?”

  “I think we might want to contact Mimi and get a copy of that exchange.”

  “I’ll get an officer on it.”

  “And also parkour runners that fit Igazi’s description. It’s probably a relatively small group.”

  She put a call through, then said, “Hey, Pat, listen, I’m sorry about what happened when we first got to Canyon’s room. With Kevin, I mean. I had no idea he was going to be here today.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “It put you in an awkward spot.”

  “No need to apologize. Really.”

  “Okay.” It seemed like she might want to say something more regarding the topic, but she held back and instead asked, “Did you get what you needed from Canyon’s phone?”