Download Murder

by Patrick Logan

  Drake grabbed a leather chair and wheeled it to the corner, and then stood on it. He pulled his right hand from his pocket and reached up high, only to realize that he had grabbed the wrong object.

  Cradled between his fingers was the finger bone that Ivan Meitzer had given him in the diner what felt like ages ago.

  Drake cursed and went to put it back in his pocket when the chair unexpectedly swiveled, and he was forced to reach out and brace himself with his hand. As he did, the bone slipped from his fingers and clattered to the linoleum floor below.

  “Shit,” he said as he watched it slide under the desk.

  Drake quickly pulled out the button camera and pressed the sticky back against the wall near the ceiling. He leaned back slightly, observing his handy work. It wasn’t completely unnoticeable on the white wall as it had been beneath Mrs. Armatridge’s stairs, but a passive observer would likely just think it a hole or chip in the paint.

  Or at least that was what he hoped.

  He was about to hop off the chair when a sound from behind him caused him to freeze.

  “Roger? That you? What are you doing up there?”

  For several seconds, Drake could do nothing but stand frozen on the chair, his back to the man who had entered the office behind him.

  His mind was racing as it cycled through every scenario he could think of from knocking the guy out, to making up some elaborate lie to get him out of this jam, all the while Ken’s voice provided a soundtrack to his thoughts.

  Whatever you do, don’t get caught. Don’t be seen.

  Drake settled for the latter, giving up the hope of not being seen.

  That ship had sailed.

  He turned slowly, almost robotically, so as to not alarm the man behind him.

  With the most genuine smile he could muster, he said, “No, not Roger. But close.”

  The man in the office doorway couldn’t have been older than twenty, and even that must have been a stretch. With shellacked hair and a doughy face, the boy was staring at him with wide eyes. “The name is Robert Watts—building superintendent.”

  He lowered himself off the chair and then strode forward, hand outstretched. The man—intern, he had to be an intern—looked at his hand suspiciously and Drake withdrew it before it became awkward.

  “We’ve been having some problems with the drop ceiling in the other units—especially in the Subway ‘round back. The heavy snow has been causing some water damage. I was just checking for any sign of moisture. Can’t risk having mold in here.”

  The man squinted at him.

  “I ran it by Mary,” Drake said quickly, surprised that he had remembered the woman’s name. “Said it wasn’t a problem to come in and check it out.”

  “And?” the man asked, his eyebrows rising.

  Drake’s smile grew.

  “And you—heh, we’re in luck. It’s all dry up there. Should stay that way, too, if there’s no more snow, that is.”

  When the man continued to stare, Drake made his way toward the door.

  “Sorry if I startled you. Can’t be too careful with these things. Once there’s one spot of mold, there’s a dozen.”

  As he passed the intern, he observed him closely, trying to get a read on him.

  It wasn’t too late to use the Armstrong method, as much as he knew that would only end badly for both of them. Thankfully, the man’s wide cheeks suddenly tightened in a smile.

  “Well that’s good news, I guess. Just make sure that you vote Kildare.”

  Drake chuckled and walked into the main portion of the campaign office.

  “Of course. Here’s to hoping the good doctor comes out on top.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said over his shoulder.

  Less than a minute later, Drake was back in his car, breathing heavily in the front seat, his heart still racing.

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing, Drake? Whose side are you on?”

  But before he could answer his own question, a strange chime from somewhere in his thick coat interrupted him. At first, he thought it was the smartphone that Screech had given him, but then remembered that had set it on silent. Drake patted his chest, and then pulled out the e-reader.

  His heart sunk when he turned it on and saw that there wasn’t just one book cover on the home screen, but two. The second also showed the pale face of a woman, her lips painted in blood.

  Red Smile PART II, the title read.

  Drake swallowed hard and opened the book.

  It was only later that he realized that he had forgotten to grab the bone that he had dropped in the doctor’s office.

  CHAPTER 31

  The man pushed the camera lens through the open window. He waited for the image to focus, then snapped several shots of the building, making sure that most of them included the campaign posters with the smiling doctor’s face in the background.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t too far away to capture the details he needed, he waited.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  A man in a navy coat, his chin tucked low, made his way toward the door. When his bare hand reached for the handle, he paused, turning to look around.

  The camera shutter fired rapidly, capturing more than a dozen pictures of the man’s face in just a few second.

  Zooming in, he captured several more pictures of the man inside the campaign office, and then of him exiting no more than five minutes later.

  When Drake made it to his car and slumped in the front seat, the man captured a final image, then pulled the camera inside the vehicle and closed the window.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What did you think of the profile?” Agent Stitts asked as Chase drove toward Charlotte’s last known address.

  Chase shrugged.

  “To be honest? It’s pretty vague. In a city as large as New York, you pretty much described a third of the male population. Shit, even in Larchmont, you only narrowed it down to a couple hundred people.”

  There was something else that bothered her about the profile, something that she kept to herself for the time being. Agent Stitts had said that the suspect was likely emasculated, probably at he hands of a female superior of some sort. And yet none of the bodies they had recovered showed any signs of sexual assault. She was no expert, of course, but something felt fundamentally wrong about their assumptions.

  Agent Stitts turned his eyes to the road.

  “That’s fair. There’s something in my gut that’s telling me it’s not quite right, that I’m missing something.”

  Chase nodded, and Agent Stitts faced her again.

  “Thinking the same thing?”

  “Yes—there’s something that we’re just not seeing.”

  “Agreed. Let me ask you something: do you trust your gut?”

  The question caught Chase by surprise.

  “My gut? Like a gut feeling?”

  “Sure.”

  Again, Chase wasn’t sure if this was some sort of test, if Agent Stitts was trying to work his way into her mind. But, as before, all the second guessing was exhausting. She had a murderer to catch, and couldn’t be concerned with whether her hair was straight or if she used proper grammar.

  The FBI could wait until this was over.

  “Do I trust my gut? Sometimes… the fact is, sometimes my intuition’s right, and sometimes it’s just dead wrong.”

  Her thoughts turned to the scars on the inside of her elbows. Intuition had told her that she should gain the trust of the mid-level dealer they were pursuing by taking a hit of heroin. The same intuition had left her with a deadly habit and a whole division of Seattle Narcotics officers looking for her.

  And long before that, her intuition had cost her something even more important.

  “Nowadays I try to rely on facts and not feelings.”

  Agent Stitts continued to stare out the window, and Chase worried that she might have said something that offended him.

  “I can see how—”
<
br />   “Millions of years of evolution,” he said absently.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t ignore your intuition, Chase. Millions of years of evolution served to develop an inherent defense mechanism in all of us. Call it gut feeling, intuition, a hunch, whatever you call it, it’s a valuable asset in the field. Trust me on this one. Sometimes your eyes see things, but your conscious mind is too busy or too tired to take notice. Your gut, however, is pre-historic. Listen, you ever waited for an elevator and when the door opened, you just had a bad feeling about the guy inside waiting for you to enter?”

  Chase tilted her head to one side.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe’s good enough. Everyone has had these experiences in their lives, but there’s a selection bias at play. People who listen to these urges? They don’t think twice about them later because nothing happened. In fact, they might even convince themselves that they were being foolish, childish, even. But it’s the time when you feel something’s wrong, that something’s just not right, and you don’t listen to it and something bad happens? That’s what we remember. Over time, if this job has taught me one thing, it’s to trust my instincts.”

  Agent Stitts peered over at the GPS mounted on the dash.

  “We’ve got another ten minutes at least in New York traffic before we arrive at Charlotte’s house,” he informed her. “Mind if I tell you a story? About why I decided to pursue a career in the FBI? In profiling?”

  Chase wasn’t in the mood for fables, but couldn’t think of a good reason for Stitts not to continue.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Agent Stitts looked up and to the right when he spoke next, a tell from poker that suggested that he was remembering something from his past and not just making it up.

  “I was young, maybe twenty years old,” Stitts began in a monotone voice, “just starting out as a real estate agent. I was also with this girlfriend who was… well, demanding, let’s say. She was constantly pissed because of the long hours I worked. This one night, after she had just told me that she was getting fed up, a client felt the need to inspect every single floor board in the house that he was thinking of putting an offer on. I could literally hear my girlfriend getting angrier the longer she waited for me at home. By the time my client was ready to leave, I was already twenty minutes late for dinner. And I still had to drive home, which, in Houston traffic, was going to take at least double that. Anyways, on the way home I thought it would be a good idea to grab a bottle of wine to smooth things over, you know? There was this store that I usually went to for wine and beer that wasn’t too far from my place. So, I’m in a hurry, thinking about what I was going to say, what joke I could make in order to make sure my girlfriend didn’t bite my head off, and I headed into the store. As soon as I opened that door, I felt that something was off. And I’m not talking about something flitting like, ‘oh, I should by this lottery ticket, it’s a winner,’ no bullshit like that. This was a strong feeling in my gut that almost made me throw up. And you know what I did?”

  Chase shrugged.

  “You walked out?”

  “That’s right—I walked out and went home. Skipped the wine altogether.”

  “And? What happened?”

  “Found out on the news later that the proprietor had been shot dead and his store had been robbed. At first, I couldn’t believe it. In fact, I was so shocked by the ordeal that I actually went back to the store and found out that it had been robbed minutes after I had left. I know what you’re thinking, it was a coincidence, which is fine, because that’s what I thought, too. But, long story short, I managed to get a hold of the security tape from the store. I must have watched that video a thousand times.”

  Again, he paused.

  “What was on the tape?”

  “I saw what I already knew, but hadn’t registered. At the time, I was living in a roughish part of Houston and every single time I walked into a convenience store or liquor store—and I do mean every time—the guy or girl behind the counter gave me the good old fashioned up down. It’s like part of their training, I guess. Anyways, this time, the guy only glanced over at me and then looked away. In the video, you clearly see me stare at the guy behind the counter as this happens, then I follow his gaze to a man perusing the shelves wearing a parka. A parka in Houston in the middle of summer. I knew then that this is what my ‘instincts’ had picked up on. They saved my life.”

  Chase thought about the story for a moment. There were many times in her life when something like this had happened, not as serious as what Agent Stitts described of course, but similar, but she also figured that there were an equal number of times in which her instincts were just dead wrong.

  The killer returning to the barn, for instance. In the end, Chase decided to try and lighten the mood as opposed to challenging him.

  “And what did your girlfriend say?”

  Agent Stitts laughed.

  “Ha, she dumped my ass. Made me think I would have been better off getting that bottle of wine after all. Well, that’s my origin story, what’s yours? Why did you get into the police force and why do you want to join the FBI?”

  Chase frowned. Perhaps it was her intuition that had told her that this question was coming, which was why she wanted to avoid the discussion in the first place. Or maybe it was just plain common sense.

  “Well,” she said, turning into the driveway of a brightly lit bungalow, “would you look at that.”

  Agent Stitts followed her finger.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Charlotte’s house. Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  CHAPTER 33

  “C’mon, Chase, pick up the phone,” Drake grumbled. He waited for the answering machine to roll before hanging up. Pulling into the strip mall that housed Triple D, he drove right up to the doors and parked his Crown Vic. Then he hopped out, e-reader in hand.

  “Hey Screech?” he said as he entered Triple D. He noticed that the door to his office was closed and inside he could make out the silhouettes of two men: one small, with a q-tip shaped head, and the other a massive, boulder of a man.

  Drake strode over to the door and pulled it open.

  Screech startled and leaned back in Drake’s chair as he entered.

  “Drake, this is Bob Bumacher,” he said after collecting himself, “He is the one whose boat—”

  “—yacht—” Drake corrected.

  Screech nodded.

  “Whose yacht has gone missing. We were just working out the details of our arrangement. Apparently, there is some precious cargo on board,” Screech’s face twisted slightly as he said this, which gave Drake pause.

  Precious cargo?

  But Drake didn’t have time for this. He needed to contact Chase, to tell her about the new story. About part II. And he needed to figure out who the hell was writing the morbid tales.

  “Alright, sounds good. I hate to be rude, Mr. Bumacher, but I really have another matter that I have to discuss with my partner.”

  Bob Bumacher stood, and Drake instinctively leaned away from him. He wasn’t just a large man, as Drake had suspected based on the outline, he was huge. Six-six if he was a foot, with shoulders like watermelons. He was wearing a tight-fighting t-shirt with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face across the chest and the words, “Come with me if you want to lift” written on top.

  He nodded to Drake, and then scratched his bald head.

  “You’ve come highly recommended, Drake. I expect that you and your partner will use the utmost discretion in your search for my vessel. Me and Screech have already worked out the details, and I’m sure that you’ll find them more than satisfactory.”

  Bob held out a giant hand and Drake didn’t so much as shake it as was swallowed by it.

  After Bob regurgitated his hand, he turned and left the office, leaving the door open behind him. When he was gone, Drake shook his head and looked over at Screech.

  “What the hell was that all about?” he asked,
but when Screech opened his mouth to answer, Drake held a hand up. “Never mind.”

  He hooked a thumb, indicating that Screech should get out of his chair. Screech nodded and stood, and Drake slumped into it.

  “What’s up?”

  “There’s been another murder and another story,” Drake replied, tossing the e-reader roughly on the desk.

  Screech frowned.

  “For real? Fucking hell. I couldn’t find anything about the author… about L. Wiley online. Literally nothing. The man’s a ghost. No posts on any of the popular writing boards, no website, no email address, no nothing. But I’m no expert when it comes to online publishing. You know anyone who might have experience?”

  Drake closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

  “Dammit,” he muttered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Not him, I can’t go to him again.

  “Nothing.”

  But he had to go to him, he was the only person who Drake knew had experience with this sort of thing.

  His mind turned to the envelope that he had put in Jasmine’s mailbox, which he was sure he had seen in Suzan’s pocket later when she bounded upstairs.

  “I might know somebody, but I’m going to need a favor.”

  “Another camera?” Screech asked.

  Drake shook his head.

  “No, no camera—I need you to make sure that the one that I put up is recording, but this is something different. I need some cash.”

  Screech’s face contorted.

  “Money? For what?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I just need some cash.”

  Screech chewed his lip as he thought this over.

  “How much?” he said at last.

  Drake thought about it. It was usually him who was getting paid, and that was usually in ten thousand dollar increments. Only after what had happened…

  “Twenty grand,” he said flatly.

  Screech’s eyes bulged.

  “Twenty grand? Shit, you lose a bet?”

  “You’ll get it back after Meathead Bumacher settles. But I’m going to need it today.”

  Screech shook his head.