Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  The article covered the airtight bomb shelters as well as a tunnel that led from the Packard Plant to vast underground salt mines, and an Underground Railroad system that was used to secretly transport slaves to Canada during the times of oppression and the Civil War.

  As Ali was sorting through the implications, someone knocked on his door.

  Expecting that it might be Abdul, who didn’t speak, Ali simply said, “I’m coming,” rather than asking who was there.

  At the door, Abdul greeted him silently, then handed him the tablet with the words already typed in: Good morning, brother. How are your wounds today?

  Ali tapped in his response: I am recovering well. Thank you.

  —I am sorry I could not meet you for breakfast. Will you join me for prayers?

  —Yes. Of course.

  —Forgive me if I must pray silently.

  —There is nothing to forgive.

  —See you downstairs.

  —I will be right there.

  ++++

  Tessa was asleep when she heard her mom’s ringtone and, even though it usually took her like an hour to wake up, she somehow found herself immediately alert as she answered the phone.

  “Mom, where are you?”

  “I’ll explain everything when I get home—which I think will be tonight.”

  “I thought you were gonna be gone for a couple days.”

  “I’m hoping to change my flights, and if everything works out, I should be landing at JFK right around seven thirty.”

  Tessa could tell by her mom’s tone of voice that she was upset, but when she asked what was going on, her mother simply said, “It’s fine.”

  “So, you’re done seeing whoever it was you flew out to see?”

  “Yes. It looks like we’re done.”

  67

  8:34 A.M.

  Dispersal in 6 hours

  Sharyn entered the tea and pastry shop where she and Christie had agreed to meet.

  An attractive, yet clearly heavy-hearted woman was seated by the window and rose when Sharyn entered.

  “Hello.” She had a to-go cup in her hand. “Sharyn?”

  “Hi, Christie. Can I buy you breakfast?”

  “No. Thank you. But if you’d like something . . .” Christie gestured toward the glass counter. “Please.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “No doughnut? Croissant?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Alright. Um . . . I was wondering if you’d like to take a walk along the river?”

  “Sure,” Sharyn said. “The path just outside is actually quite a popular trail for runners. Dog walkers.”

  “Okay.”

  So far it was one of those conversations where you edit everything carefully before you speak and say only the safe things. But Sharyn didn’t expect it to stay that way for long.

  Christie retrieved her purse, and Sharyn led her to the walking path along the bank of the Detroit River.

  A group of four joggers who were taking advantage of the cool morning were huffing toward them.

  Sharyn stepped to the side to allow them to pass. When they had, she said to Christie, “First of all, I’d like to apologize for the misunderstanding last night, and also assure you: there was nothing going on between Pat and me.”

  “Okay.”

  It was a response that was too quick and too polite: Oh, well, now that we’ve cleared that up, I can rest easy.

  Christie’s next words took Sharyn by surprise. “You are quite beautiful.” Christie’s voice was soft. Almost reverent. “I have to admit, I was wondering.”

  Sharyn searched for an appropriate response. Thanking Christie for the compliment didn’t feel right, and neither did reciprocating and telling her how pretty she was as well, so in the end she didn’t address the comment at all, but instead said, “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything that would help.”

  “You’re the one who requested Pat for this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you?”

  “His geospatial specialty. He’s the best at what he does, and I thought he could help us save innocent people by catching the guy who’s doing this.”

  That sounded prepared. Too planned out.

  Sharyn hesitated slightly, then went on, “And because I wanted to see him. Full disclosure: I knew he wasn’t married. I didn’t know if he was seeing anyone, and I wanted to find out if there would still be chemistry between us.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “Was there? Or maybe I should say, ‘Is there?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still love him?” Christie asked.

  Water rippled toward them, a gentle morning breeze whispered past, but the calm morning belied the tension Sharyn was feeling here with Pat’s girlfriend.

  “It’s been a long time since we were together,” she said.

  “That’s not what I asked you, Sharyn.”

  “No. No, of course not . . . I mean, I don’t.”

  “You were doing better a minute ago when you were telling me the truth. I have to say, you lie about as badly as Pat does.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I don’t know that I ever stopped loving him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For?”

  “The truth. Have you told him that? I mean, that you still love him?”

  “No.” Sharyn stopped on the path and Christie stood beside her. “Listen, I know that last night looked . . . Well, I can understand why you’d be upset. I’d be upset too if I were you. But Pat and I didn’t do anything. Please, don’t let me get in the way of you two being happy.”

  Christie sighed lightly. “I was hoping it would be easy to hate you.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s easy to like you.”

  “Why?”

  Because I want what’s best for Pat, and in a few days, he’ll be heading back to New York City and you’ll be there and I won’t.

  “He cares about you,” Sharyn said. “He cares about you a lot.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “By how upset he was after he got off the phone with you, thinking that he’d hurt you.”

  Neither woman said anything.

  But they didn’t start walking again either.

  “Now what?” Sharyn asked at last. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I need to decide if I should stay for another day like I was planning to, or change my flight and head back to the city today.”

  “Which way are you leaning?”

  “I’m not sure. The earliest flight I could get on leaves at five. It doesn’t look full, so I have a couple of hours yet to figure that out.”

  Honestly, Sharyn didn’t know what would be best for Pat and his relationship with Christie—if she returned home now, or if she stayed in Detroit and tried to work things out here.

  And, as much as she’d been telling the truth about wanting Pat to be happy, it hadn’t been the whole truth—she really wished she would be the one waiting for him in New York City.

  And so, she was torn.

  Yes, she liked Christie, but she didn’t like her enough to quell the love she still had for Pat.

  “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do,” she said to Christie. “I promise not to get between you two.”

  “Because you still love him?”

  “Because I want what’s best for him.” She could have said more. Maybe she should have, but she left it at that.

  68

  I went to the airport to pick up Ralph.

  While I was walking into the terminal, I recalled that yesterday I’d promised Starr, the secretary at the city records department, that I would buy her lipstick and nail polish in exchange for her help locating the records for Linc
oln High School.

  Pausing near baggage claim, I went online and found the makeup products on Amazon—and they were each at least five times what I’d expected, but I didn’t want to go back on my word, so I put the order through.

  Nude Velvet.

  London Reckless.

  Ninety dollars for the lipstick? Sixty-five for nail polish?

  I wish I’d heard about this on career day in high school.

  For the shipping address I listed the city records department “Attn. Starr.”

  Then I placed a second order and typed in Christie’s address in New York City. It seemed to me that Starr probably had good taste and that it couldn’t hurt to have a little something special waiting for Christie back at her apartment.

  On Wednesday night, I’d been reminded that my friend Calvin Werjonic had consulted with the city on environmental crime reduction strategies, and now that I suspected that we were looking for a Bluebeard and I had a few minutes to myself, I thought it might be the ideal time to give him a call.

  For privacy, I found a quiet corner near the security checkpoint where I could wait for Ralph’s plane, which was scheduled to land in about fifteen minutes.

  Calvin travels a lot and I wasn’t sure what time zone he was in, but I also knew him well enough to realize that he was an early riser—as a distinguished Englishman, he loved those brisk early-morning walks—and for him it was never the wrong time to consult on a case. And even though everyone except for Supreme Court justices and school cafeteria workers would have retired by the time they were his age, he was going as strong as ever.

  When I was studying for my doctorate, there’d been no question in my mind about my first choice for an advisor.

  Dr. Werjonic was a legend in the field of environmental criminology. His groundbreaking research on serial offenders had given legs to the entire field of geospatial investigation as it stands today.

  An ardent student of human nature, Calvin always opted for video calls rather than simply audio ones. As he commented to me once, “So much of communication is nonverbal—we know this from reams of research. So, why would we eliminate all of that from our important conversations when we have the technology to utilize it to the fullest?”

  I texted him to see if he’d be up for a video call and within minutes my phone was notifying me of an incoming call through the video app he preferred using.

  “Patrick, my boy,” he said in his distinct and endearing English accent.

  “Calvin, it’s good to see your face.”

  “Yours as well.”

  After quickly catching up with each other, I got right to the matter at hand.

  Without stating specifics that might undermine the confidentiality of the investigation, I told him what I could about the case, sending him select information to review.

  He listened carefully, asking an occasional question for clarification, but mostly he just sipped the Earl Grey tea that he appreciated almost as much as I did my coffee.

  After he’d had a chance to look over the files I sent, he said, “I’m certain you’ve plowed the obvious fields: looking into parents, teachers, friends of the victims.”

  “Yes. No links that we can see. However, we have strong reason to believe that the offender is the man I told you about a moment ago, Dylan Neeson.”

  “The one who attacked your coworker.”

  “Yes.”

  Coworker. Yes. That’s who she is. That’s all she is.

  No—

  Yes. That’s all.

  “Why that one male victim?” Calvin interrupted my thoughts. “An outlier, you think?”

  “I’m not sure. I was wondering about that as well.”

  “Hmm. Well, we must focus on victimology.” He often spoke in this way, as if he were part of the investigation. He’d been involved in so many hundreds of cases that the approach just came second nature to him. “The epicenter of his crimes will correspond to the movement patterns of the victims. That’s the key. With a Bluebeard, establishing the link between him and the victims is more important than establishing the links between the victims themselves.”

  “I’ve been looking into that, but coming up short.”

  “In some cases, victims will travel several hours to come to the Bluebeard’s home base.”

  “These were all regional.”

  “The ones that you know of.”

  A slight pause. “Yes.”

  “Do not assume, Patrick, that all of the victims have been recovered. Think now, what attracts them to the Bluebeard?”

  “The promise of pleasure—however they might define that.”

  “Indeed.” He nodded. “The one motive, the only motive that matters. If you find out what the victims were seeking, or how they viewed or pursued pleasure, it’ll help you discover how he was luring them. The solution might very well hinge upon identifying the nature of the invitation because, with a Bluebeard, it’s always one place, but that place is not always the same location.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I tracked one Bluebeard a number of years ago who drove a delivery truck. He’d constructed a torture chamber in the back of it. The location was always moving, but the place was always the same.”

  “A peripatetic offender,” I said. “But honestly, in this case, the locations and timing of the crimes don’t speak to a killer who’s traveling through the area. And, if it is Neeson, he might be here specifically to target Sharyn.”

  “The question isn’t so much one of significance as one of attribution—not how much the detail mattered to the completion of the crime—”

  “But how much it mattered to him to commit the crime in this way.”

  “Yes. Let’s go back to the male victim for a moment.” He consulted his notes. “Gideon Flello. Was he gay?”

  “Not as far as I know. Why would that matter?”

  “The attraction factor: pleasure, as you just pointed out. What desire precipitated the act of the victims traveling to meet the killer? How is the Bluebeard allowing his victims to choose him?”

  “Don’t you mean how he’s choosing his victims?”

  “Perhaps it’s both.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re saying they want to die?”

  “By no means. And yet, they might have all come to him for the same reason. Thus, this mobile dating application you were telling me about.”

  “Sex.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So, if Gideon was looking for that, it might not have been that the killer was looking for him.”

  “We have far too many ‘mights’ right now, Patrick. At this point I would advise discovering all that you can about the Hook’dup connection.”

  “Sharyn is looking into that.”

  “I think that perhaps you might need to look into Sharyn.”

  “What? Why?”

  “According to what you told me, the killer is, to a certain degree, obsessed with her, and obsessions are not birthed in vacuums. The more you understand her past, the more you’ll understand his choices here, in the present.”

  I hadn’t told Calvin that Sharyn was Scarlett Farrow, but I had told him that her photo appeared on the painting of the crucified Christ.

  “Alright.”

  The flight monitor registered that Ralph’s plane had landed.

  If Blake had been telling me the truth, then he had Dylan and he was willing to turn him over to us—but I wasn’t going to bank on any of that. At this point, we clearly needed to pursue as many investigative routes as possible.

  Calvin closed up by saying, “Call me at the weekend, let me know what you found out.”

  “I will. And thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Find him. Stop him. Then we’ll meet for a pint.”

  A few moments after wrapping up the
video call with Calvin, I got a text from Ralph that he was deboarding, and I walked over to the TSA checkpoint to catch up with him.

  69

  9:34 A.M.

  Dispersal in 5 hours

  “How was the flight?” I asked Ralph.

  “Not great. I am not a small man, but the woman sitting next to—well, I didn’t have any room. How can I say this . . . She was a venti woman.”

  “A venti woman?”

  “Starbucks. Think about it. The next size up from a grande.”

  “Ralph, you can’t call a woman ‘venti.’ You say she’s . . . well, um . . . substantial. Or, like with a car, you might have compact, sedan, or full-size.”

  “Okay, then, she’s a Winnebago,” he muttered. “What do we know about the case?”

  I updated him as much as possible without mentioning the meeting with Blake or the deal I had agreed to.

  Ralph didn’t have any checked bags, so we walked directly to my car, but before we climbed in, he chugged my shoulder. “So, Christie made it here, right? You two have a good night?”

  “I have to say, that was very generous of you to give her your frequent flyer miles.” It wasn’t really an answer, but my best attempt at a pivot.

  “All for a good cause. Were you surprised?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  A smile. “And? How’d it go?”

  “Maybe not as well as it could have.”

  “Okay. And what does that mean?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Tell her?”

  “What you promised me you were gonna tell her as soon as you saw her. Remember what you said yesterday? That you’re sorry and that you love her—with a pause.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t exactly get to that.”

  He looked at me sternly. “Go on.”

  “It’s sort of a long story.”

  “Edit it.”

  “I wasn’t at my motel when she called.”

  “I’ve known you for a long time, Pat. I can tell when you’re being evasive, and you’re being evasive. What happened?”