Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  “Then why did you come here?” the man gasped.

  “To make sure justice gets done,” Blake told him.

  And then he delivered on his words.

  It was what a father would’ve done.

  Then, as he raised Dylan, he taught him about the importance of justice as well.

  More than a decade had passed since Dylan had replied to any of Blake’s letters, so Blake didn’t know if his brother was well. Still, he’d kept writing to him, once a week, every week. More than five hundred letters and no response.

  Once again, it was what a dad would do for his son.

  You don’t give up on family.

  However, based on what Blake had seen when he was caring for Dylan all those years ago, he also knew what Dylan was capable of and how it went far beyond anything justice would require.

  Once Dylan got started here in Michigan, got a taste for killing again, he wouldn’t stop on his own and Blake doubted the police would be able to find him before he killed again.

  And so now, if Dylan really was in Detroit, Blake needed to stop him. If he did not, innocent people would die and his brother might be killed by police during his apprehension. Dylan could not be allowed to roam the streets, and Blake did not want him dead.

  Blake’s options were limited and he wasn’t sure exactly what he would do, even if he found his brother.

  Mannie returned from getting the food. “What’s the next step?” he asked.

  “Karate studios and military supply stores. My brother doesn’t always know when to lie low. Let’s see if he poked his head up anywhere.”

  39

  Dylan stood stoically in the shadows and watched the flames whip and wisp and curl around and through each other, intertwining in their urgent ascent to lick at the tunnel’s concrete ceiling, scarring it with soot.

  Sharp-tipped, flaming tongues.

  Black-powdered, spreading soot.

  He wasn’t sure how badly the FBI agent had been burned. He wasn’t even sure how the man had ended up down here this afternoon.

  The timing had been impeccable.

  Serendipity?

  Fate?

  Whatever it was, it might’ve been just what Dylan needed.

  The agent had identified himself only by his first name: Patrick.

  But it was the same guy from last night in the attic. Same name. Same voice. Same face.

  He was tough. Not as well trained as he might’ve been, but a scrappy fighter.

  Scrappy enough to win the fight.

  Dylan remembered falling to the gym floor. It’d knocked the wind out of him, and if the floor hadn’t been warped like it was, he might not have been able to get out of there at all.

  It hadn’t injured him severely. Still, the way he landed had tweaked his left leg, and he’d sustained a slight limp that wasn’t easy to hide.

  Sometimes in prison, you learn to act crazy. During his years behind bars, Dylan had seen plenty of men get unhinged or get high on the drugs family members or guards snuck in for them, or on the cleaning agents that they mixed together in ways that only the most desperate drug addicts will do.

  The coughing and the slurred speech.

  Given time, they weren’t that difficult to learn.

  He’d imitated those for the agent. His disguise as a vagrant had served him well over the last several months. People don’t give the homeless a second thought. If you want to disappear in a city like Detroit, you don’t wear a suit. You don’t call attention to yourself. You hide in plain sight by walking around dressed up as one of the Invisible People.

  But he wasn’t dressed like that when he committed the homicides. He was dressed as himself.

  Though everything on the shrine held significance to him, he was the saddest to know that the photo of him and his brother was gone. It was the only thing he’d taken with him into prison and the only thing he’d taken back out with him when he was released.

  He’d left the letters there. All read. Hundreds of them. All channeled through his lawyer’s office. It’d been far too long since he’d replied to his brother, but still he loved him. Still, he’d been glad to get those letters every week.

  Shame had kept him from writing back.

  Shame that he was not more ashamed of what he had done.

  It certainly seemed that, based on what Patrick said, the FBI agent knew something about Scarlett. He’d recognized the girl in the photo and was apparently familiar with the movie.

  Also, he knew the name “Igazi.”

  So, that meant he merited getting some of the lighter fluid squirted onto him as well.

  No, today, the timing wasn’t right for the Feds to find the shrine. And with the agent down here, it was necessary to use the gas he’d kept available for an emergency to destroy the evidence.

  He’d learned one thing from his older brother and that’d been reiterated to him in prison: to find people who don’t want to be found, you start with those most likely to know them. Then you squeeze them with a threat or offer them a promise.

  How do you get someone to do something for you? Promise to give him what he wants, or threaten to take away what he loves. Bribe or extort. Almost always it boiled down to one of those two approaches.

  Dylan removed the wig and fake beard and the reeking clothes he’d taken off the squatter that he’d killed with the box cutter right after arriving in Detroit.

  He was thankful that the person he was working with, the one he’d promised his devotion to, had not been present when Patrick was here. It would’ve made things awkward. It might have required actions that Dylan wouldn’t have wanted to take and might even have regretted.

  He tossed the lighter-fluid-drenched disguise into the fire and stood naked before it. Eyes closed. Arms outstretched, as if he were about to be transformed into an angel.

  The Angel of Light.

  Or the Destroyer of Worlds.

  He still wasn’t sure which.

  Maybe the same angel could, at times, be both.

  He was only interested in justice and in righting wrongs, and sometimes that happened in the light, sometimes it happened in the darkness.

  Yes, he deserved to die for the things he had done, but he had served fifteen years for his crimes. He figured that had earned him a few more years of freedom before he would need to take his own life. But Scarlett also deserved to die for what she had done. A murderer does not deserve to go free.

  He would not run from his fate, but first he needed to make sure that Lady Justice visited Scarlett Farrow, whatever name she might be using today.

  After a minute or so, he backed away from the fire, put on some fresh clothes, and went to clean up before meeting the person he had found it so profitable to partner with.

  40

  In the tunnel again, I found that the mattress was still smoldering hot enough that I wouldn’t be able to get past it. The shrine and all the evidence it’d held were destroyed.

  Still unsure if Anthony had been injured or not, I scanned the tunnel beyond the burned-out living quarters.

  No sign of him standing there. No sign of a body.

  The tunnel, although tall enough for me to stand, didn’t allow me enough height to jump over the mattress, unless I managed some sort of diving roll, which my burned side and sore ankle wouldn’t have accepted very well, and which I wasn’t sure I could even pull off anyway.

  I glanced in the mirror that was facing the burned-up shrine. As I did, I thought of those letters, the ones that the offender had carved into the victims: WORR.

  With the backward Rs.

  Maybe it was going to spell something after all—but not forward, backward.

  Would he have carved an A in Jamika’s forehead?

  ARROW.

  FARROW.

  Is he spelling her name ou
t on his victims? Her full name would mean fourteen letters. Is that where all this is leading? Fourteen homicides?

  After one more look around, I grabbed my ruined shirt and returned to the surface.

  ________

  By the time I was walking out of the school, Dr. Kevin Gordon, Sharyn’s ex-husband, had arrived.

  “Sharyn called me.” He was standing beside his BMW, and a young girl who I guessed was Olivia was staring out the backseat window. “You were burned?”

  “That was quick,” I said to Kevin. I waved at the girl and, after a brief hesitation, she waved back. “Getting here, I mean.”

  Kevin gestured toward my side. “I was in the area. Let me take a look.”

  I set my shirt on the ground beside the hoodies and, as he examined the reddened and tender skin, he said, “Was Canyon helpful to you this morning?”

  “I can’t really discuss those matters, Kevin. I think you know that.”

  “Right.” As he inspected me, he took the most careful note of the areas where the skin had blistered. “You know how, in an action movie, there’s always that scene where the hero takes off his shirt so the audience can see either his abs or his scars? You know what I’m talking about?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was mocking me or not. “I don’t get to the movies as much as I’d like.”

  “Well, he’s usually ripped or there are battle scars that tell the story of how tough he is.”

  “Okay.”

  He pointed to my left shoulder where I’d sustained a through and through years ago when I was still a homicide detective, then he indicated the more recently healed knife wound from a fight I was in earlier this year.

  “Sometimes you get a little close to the action,” he concluded.

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  An ambulance pulled into the parking lot.

  “Whatever happened between you and Sharyn?” Kevin asked. “Why didn’t it work out?”

  “Different paths,” I told him simply.

  “Well.” He finished studying my burns. “Topical antibiotics. Keep the area clean. I think you’ll make it out alright this time without any more.”

  “Any more?”

  “Scars. I’ll give you a prescription for some pain meds, just in case.”

  “Don’t worry about it. But thanks.”

  One of the EMTs was hurrying my way carrying a large first aid kit.

  “It’s going to hurt.”

  “I’ll be alright.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  I thanked Kevin again, then asked the EMT if the CSI unit was on its way.

  “There was a shooting across town. Everyone’s stretched thin. Not sure when they’ll get here.”

  To preserve the evidence as much as possible, I asked him if he had anything I could put the hoodies in. While he was looking for a couple of bags, Olivia climbed out of the BMW and Kevin called to her, “I told you to stay in the car, Olivia.”

  She made an unhappy face. “I’m hungry. And I like to be called Livvy.”

  “We’ll get you something to eat in just a minute.”

  She was eyeing me carefully.

  Since I didn’t have a shirt on, it was easy to see the burns—and the scars. To avoid frightening or upsetting her, I put on the shirt that was half burned up.

  “Hello, there.” I waved again. “I’m Pat.”

  When she didn’t reply, Kevin urged her, “Tell him your name.”

  “Livvy.”

  “Olivia,” Kevin said.

  She didn’t correct herself.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she told me.

  “Pat is one of your mom’s friends,” Kevin explained in a tone that was hard to read. “You can talk to him.”

  Knowing what to say to children has never been my strong suit, but in an attempt to be friendly, I said, “I hear you were at ballet camp this morning.”

  “Uh-huh.” She pointed at my injured side, which was still visible through the hole in the shirt. “Does that hurt?”

  “Not too much. Your daddy helped me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Pat is very brave,” Kevin told her. “He’s good at catching bad people.”

  Maybe it was simply because his daughter was here, but his entire demeanor now was strikingly different from what it’d been earlier today.

  “Are you a hero?” Olivia asked me. “Daddy likes movies with heroes.”

  “No. I’m just—”

  “Yes,” Kevin said. “Pat is a real hero. Just ask your mommy. She’ll tell you.”

  Now his tone was getting easier to read, but Olivia didn’t seem to notice or care about the attitude it carried. “I like ponies,” she told me.

  “Your mom told me that. And princesses, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, Livvy,” Kevin said, opting for the name she preferred. He opened the car door and guided her into the sedan. “Let’s go get you some food.”

  41

  The EMT offered to bandage my side for me, and unsure if I would be going back into the tunnel and perhaps getting soot or dirt on the burns, I agreed. Paramedics often carry extra shirts in case one gets blood on it, and one of the men gave me his from the ambulance.

  It had a slew of EMT achievement patches on it.

  Another type of trophy.

  Idols by another name.

  As the man worked on bandaging me, the smell of smoke struck me again—my mind probably just registering at last how much my clothes were still carrying the evidence of the fire.

  The guy was just finishing up as Sharyn arrived, leapt out of her car, and hurried toward me. “Are you okay, Pat?” she asked urgently.

  “All good.”

  Ever since Kevin had left with Olivia, I’d been processing what the man in the tunnel had said to me and I was ready to talk it through with Sharyn.

  The paramedic tucked the end of the bandage wrap in, then stepped away, leaving the two of us alone.

  “Your ex-husband was very helpful, by the way,” I said, buttoning up the shirt.

  “I’m glad he made it.”

  “He had Olivia with him. It sounded like they were on the way to lunch.”

  “Huh.”

  “Everything alright?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She gestured toward the plastic bags. “The hoodie?”

  “Hoodies. Two of them. Pretty much everything else was destroyed. Make sure CSI checks the tips of their drawstrings for prints. They’re plastic. Last night I saw the guy I chased rolling one of them between his fingers while he was standing across the street. It might just be the break we need.”

  “Good eye.”

  “Also, there were cans of food down in the tunnel. We might get prints or DNA. The lighter will be somewhere in the remains of the mattress. It has a medical symbol on it.”

  “A medical symbol?”

  “The caduceus. Who knows? Maybe if we find the lighter we can trace it back to the place where he bought it. And we might be in luck if the bottle of lighter fluid melted.”

  “Prints get melded onto it.”

  “So you’ve done this before?”

  “A couple of times. Tell me about the man who was in the tunnel.”

  I kept my voice low to make sure no one else heard what I had to say. “He happened to show up at precisely the same time that I was in there. He had a picture of you and apparent evidence from the crime scenes—even though they were located all across the city. For instance, the head of that doll that was in the room where Jamika was found. Then he destroyed it, burned it all up. He knew the name ‘Igazi,’ and that the girl in the picture was from a movie. Also, he told me he’d traded clothes with someone to get the hoodies—but that would have put him there at the time of the chase last night—too
coincidental. No, I’m not thinking it was random. And I’m not convinced he was a vagrant—or at least not one who had nothing to do with these crimes.”

  “We’re on the same page there.”

  “You mentioned something on the phone earlier about who this might be, that you might have an idea. What were you going to tell me?”

  ++++

  Sharyn evaluated how much to share.

  She glanced around and noticed that the paramedic who’d treated Pat’s side was lingering nearby. For privacy, she took Pat’s elbow and led him toward the overgrown, unkempt field beside the school.

  “When I was in college,” she told him, “I had a stalker. He’d seen Sanctuary and became obsessed with it. He attacked me, was sent to prison. On the ride over here, just a few minutes ago, I found out he was released in April.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Yes. It was so long ago that it never even occurred to me that there might be a connection until you mentioned that my photo was down there in the tunnel.”

  “How could he have found out what city you’re in?”

  “There are only four people who know who I am, or, well, who I was. You, Kevin, the agent from the Department of Justice who finalized my new identity, and a friend from my modeling days named Simone Tee.” She tried to keep the tear back but felt it leak out of her eye. She quickly wiped it away.

  “What is it?” Pat asked concernedly.

  “She was killed in May. In an explosion. I just found that out now on the drive too. The man I knew had a thing for grenades.” Another tear.

  This one, he wiped away for her.

  “We’d been in contact about getting together this summer,” she said. “Her father was dying, she needed someone to talk to.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your friend.”

  “She didn’t follow up with me, but until today it didn’t click that any of that might be related to this case.”

  “You had no reason to think it was. From what we knew, there weren’t any clues linking those events.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then sighed and collected herself. “Thank you. I’ll be okay. I just . . . it’s just a lot to process.”