“Embracing the Manbeast, Seducing the Manbeast, Enveloping the Manbest… what the hell kind of shit is this?”
Dunbar blew up the covers, which all had some derivation of a bare-chested man who looked half wolf and a scantily clad woman staring up at him.
“Shifter romance,” Dunbar said, sounding almost embarrassed. “It’s about—”
“Who cares what it’s about,” Chase snapped. “Who’s the author?”
“R.S. Germaine,” Dunbar said.
Chase felt a weight lift from her shoulders.
“Great. Get his—or her—address. Looks like me and you, Stitts, are going to pay the animal porn author a visit.”
But, once again, Dunbar shook his head.
“Jesus Christ, what now?”
Dunbar gulped audibly and brought up another screen. It was the author profile for R.S. Germaine.
“You can’t.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because R.S. Germaine is also a pen name.”
CHAPTER 39
Drake couldn’t believe that he was back at Patty’s Diner. He would’ve chosen any location, any other location in the entire city, except for this place, but the bastard refused to meet anywhere else.
In fact, Drake was surprised that he was willing to see him at all. It had been at least a month since he had visited the dilapidated diner, and he didn’t miss it.
It had the same, cracked vinyl booths, the same cloying stench of decades of grease mixed with a hint of bleach, and the same disgruntled staff.
Broomhilda waddled over to him, and if her face wasn’t so heavily lined, Drake would have thought she was smirking.
“Yeah?” she said, and Drake couldn’t help but shake his head in disgust.
“Just a coffee.”
The wannabe smirk turned into a pursed lip grimace, and Broomhilda turned to leave.
Before she returned, the door chimed and a man in a hooded parka stepped in from the cold.
Planting both hands, white from the snow, on the table, he hovered over Drake.
“You have some fucking nerve calling me,” he spat.
Drake leaned back in his chair, wondering if this was such a good idea. After all, he had just spent an hour with one person he wanted to punch, but couldn’t. But this wasn’t Raul, this man…
Drake figured he might be able to get away with giving him a bit of a thrashing.
“Sit down,” he ordered coldly.
The man’s blue eyes narrowed, but after swiping a long strand of blond hair from his face, he did as instructed.
“I took a huge risk and—”
Drake pulled the envelope from his coat pocket and laid it on the cracked table.
“Well isn’t this a change of roles,” the man said sourly. His eyes darted to the envelope, which was good, but he didn’t reach for it as Drake had hoped.
Screech had done a little research on Ivan Meitzer, and the rumor mill was abuzz with the idea that the man hadn’t made many friends over the past year or so. In addition to stepping on everyone’s toes, he had also published a rather scathing book about what it was like to work for The New York Times.
Ivan had gone from a relatively unknown reporter to creme of the crop after his exclusive with Drake about the Skeleton King, but had fallen just as hard. Drake had promised an exclusive about Craig Sloan, but hadn’t delivered.
And in the world of reporters, your word was your bond and trust was your currency.
“I need you to do something for me,” Drake said flatly. “Something that requires discretion.”
Again, Ivan’s eyes flicked to the envelope.
“Half is repayment for not giving you the Sloan exclusive. The other half is for this job.”
This time, the temptation was too great, and Ivan reached for the envelope.
Drake held fast.
“Before you take this, I can’t stress how important it is to keep this quiet. No one can know. I mean no one.”
Ivan raised his eyes to look at Drake, and after a short pause he nodded.
“What do you need?”
Drake let go of the envelope, and Ivan slipped it into his jacket.
“I need a name,” Drake said. “I need the name of an author.”
~
Drake left the diner ten minutes after Ivan had fled into the cold. He made his way quickly across the parking lot and was in the process of unlocking the door to his Crown Vic when he suddenly got the feeling that he was being watched.
His eyes snapped up, but after looking around, he saw nothing out of the ordinary for a Friday afternoon in New York City.
And yet, when his phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
CHAPTER 40
“About time,” Chase snapped at Drake as he stormed into 62nd precinct.
Drake still hadn’t fully recovered from what was already turning out to be a very long, and very trying day, and it took all his willpower not to lash out to her.
Instead, he simply nodded, and handed over the e-reader. Chase snatched it from him and then passed it to an embarrassed looking Detective Yasiv who was standing at her side.
Yasiv nodded to Drake, then disappeared down the hallway and out of sight.
“Where’s Agent Stitts?” Drake asked.
Although still frowning, Chase’s eyes softened a little.
“He’s trying to shut down the providers of the book. Get them to take it off the market.”
Drake raised an eyebrow.
“I thought we couldn’t risk—”
Chase spun away from him.
“Things have changed.”
She started toward the stairwell, and Drake pulled up beside her.
“What? What’s changed?”
Chase said nothing. Her hand shot out and she grabbed the door and pulled it wide.
Drake followed her into the stairs, but once inside, he reached for her arm.
Chase spun around, her body tense.
“Look,” Drake began, looking down at her pretty face. “I’m sorry, alright? I’m fucking trying here, Chase. I have no idea what it means to be a ‘Special Consultant’. All I know how to do is find murderers—literally, that’s it. I have no idea how to run a business, how to keep old ladies happy—although that seems to be easier than I might have thought—and I don’t know how to do whatever it is that we’re doing here.”
Chase’s eyes narrowed, and she stared at him for a good while before answering.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Her response surprised him; almost as much as his own openness. It had taken him a lot to come clean with his feelings, but now that he had, he was beginning to regret it.
And he felt the walls going back up again. He snaked a hand into his jean pocket, his fingers searching for the finger bone.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know how to run a business, you can’t babysit the elderly, you don’t understand how to be a consultant. It’s all about you and it’s only about you. Let me ask you something, Drake. Did you call Beckett? Reach out to him? See how he’s doing?”
Drake recoiled as if he had been struck.
“Didn’t think so,” Chase snapped. “You may be good at finding murderers, I won’t argue with that. But you aren’t going to find this one on your own. This isn’t Dr. Mark Kruk or Craig Sloan. You need to open up, you need to ask for help, and you need to be a team player, Drake.” Chase sighed. “I know it sounds like a fucking PSA, but I brought you in to help, and all you’ve done so far is fucking drag us down. I have no idea why you are getting the books before anyone else, but it does us no good if you are hoarding them, not letting our tech guys have a crack.” She pushed her lips together, and when she spoke next, her voice was an octave lower. “You drinking again, Drake?”
This time Drake answered. Sure, he had had a few drinks waiting for Ken Smith, but that could hardly be considered �
��drinking’.
“No,” he said, his voice even.
Chase tilted her head to one side.
“No? Then where you coming from then? And don’t lie to me, Drake.”
He ground his teeth.
“Patty’s.”
Chase shook her head.
“That’s what I thought. Let’s go, we have to get you up to speed,” she said, turning toward the stairs.
Drake watched her go. He had seen something on her face, something that hurt him deeply.
A lack of trust.
~
“An IP address is basically a way to track a computer on the ‘net. And I think I might have found something.”
Drake stared at Dunbar’s computer screen, trying to take it all in, trying to focus. But his mind continued to wander.
Was it all about him?
He had slept with Jasmine, that much was for him. But the rest… he was doing Ken’s bidding because he didn’t have a choice. Ken had given him Craig Sloan, which in turn had saved Suzan’s life. He owed the man. And after taking the ‘loan’ to pay Ivan to see what he could come up with, he was further indebted to him.
The second half… that’s for something else.
So why didn’t he just tell Chase about Ivan? Why didn’t he tell Chase why he was really at Patty’s, why he couldn’t call her back, why he was late?
Drake shook his head, something that he hoped the both Chase and Dunbar didn’t pick up on.
He didn’t tell Chase because he knew what she would do if he did: she would go to Ken, confront the man. That’s just the way she worked; she would try and protect him, as ironic as that was. And the more time he spent around Ken and his pint-sized henchman, the more dangerous he thought they were.
And to think, there’s a good chance that Ken is going to be the Mayor of New York City soon.
“Drake? You listening?”
He cleared his throat.
“Yeah, IP addresses. Got it. But I thought you couldn’t trace L. Wiley?”
Dunbar turned back to the computer screen.
“We can’t. But after compiling and comparing the books that the victims bought, I can confirm that they also have these three books in common.”
He pulled up covers that looked to Drake like covers from softcore animal porn.
“I dug even deeper. Not only did our victims buy these books, but all three of the victims posted a review on at least one of them.”
Chase suddenly leaned forward, her shoulder brushing up against Drake’s.
He was suddenly reminded of his night with Jasmine, and how he had pictured Chase’s face instead of hers.
Maybe she was right, maybe he was falling apart.
Again.
It’s like Clay, like the debacle leading to his death. Like that night in the rain.
And that night had ended badly for everyone.
I can’t let that happen to her, to Chase.
“What do you mean?” Chase asked.
“They all wrote reviews on a Manbeast book. Favorable ones, too.”
“This can’t be a coincidence,” Chase mumbled.
“And who’s this guy? This Germaine guy?”
Chase turned to face Drake, a frown on her face.
“Another fucking pen name. Agent Stitts is still trying to track down who these authors really are, but he doubts he will be able to find out.”
Drake felt like he had tripped and fallen into some technological rabbit hole.
“Yeah, but,” Dunbar continued, “while I couldn’t track the IP address of the author of Red Smile, I tracked down R.S. Germaine.”
Chase’s grip on the back of Dunbar’s chair tightened.
“What? You found him?”
Dunbar sighed.
“Not exactly.”
Drake could feel Chase tense beside her. This was turning out to be more of a black hole than a rabbit hole.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
Dunbar brought up a map of New York City on his screen. A series of red dots, maybe twenty in total, appeared over an area of approximately fifteen square miles.
“It keeps jumping around. Not like L. Wiley in Asia, though; concentrated in this area here,” he pointed to the screen. “It’s a low-income housing area. Sometimes what people do is set up one router, and then crack it so that everyone in the neighborhood can use it. That way one Internet connection can be used by many people. The IP address keeps resetting, which is why you see so many dots as the old ones are recycled. I mean, usually there aren’t as many users as this, and the connection is probably slow as hell, but people will do anything to save a buck. They probably have a couple of routers in parallel.”
“So we’re sure that someone in this area—what is that, forty houses? Fifty?” Chase asked.
“About that. The resolution is poor.”
“Okay, let’s say fifty then. So someone in one of these fifty houses is the author of the wereporn books. Is that right?”
Dunbar nodded enthusiastically.
“Yeah, but remember these aren’t houses. They’re apartment buildings. Gotta be ten, twenty units in each.”
Drake exhaled loudly. It was a lot of domiciles to search, but at least it was something.
“We need to start going apartment to apartment,” Chase said.
“To look for what? A guy with a computer? Low income or not, if they have IP addresses, they’re going to have computers,” Drake replied.
Chase thought about this.
“The profile,” she said at last. “We use the profile.”
Despite the comment, however, Drake detected apprehension in her voice. He knew about her desire to enroll in the FBI, and how her opinion on profiling had become more favorable since he had first met her, but it was obvious she thought that in this case it wouldn’t be all that helpful.
“I’ll get Yasiv to organize a team of uniforms, get them to start canvassing. Dunbar, send the list of addresses to his cell, and mine, too.”
Dunbar nodded and went back to the computer. A few computer clicks, he said, “Done.”
Chase stood up straight and headed toward the door.
“Good work, Dunbar. Keep plugging away. See if you can narrow it down somehow. Drake, you come with me. I have a job for you.”
Drake followed Chase back into the stairwell.
“What about the press conference?” he asked when they were alone again. “Any leads from that?”
He was doubtful, especially given the rash of bullshit calls they had gotten about the Butterfly Killer, but it was worth a shot.
Chase paused mid-step.
“You still didn’t see it?”
Drake shook his head.
“Well, we’ve been getting calls alright, just not about the killer.”
Drake’s brow furrowed.
“What do you mean?”
“I—”
Chase’s phone echoed through the stairwell. She picked up.
“Adams,” she said briskly. Drake watched her face as the person on the other end spoke.
It sagged and all of a sudden she looked older than her thirty or so years.
Much older.
“Okay, I’m heading there now. Keep the press away.”
When Chase hung up the phone, it looked like she had aged a decade.
“They’ve found the body, Drake. And this time it’s in a public place.”
CHAPTER 41
The girl was naked, strung up by her wrists and hanging from a soccer goalpost at Hockley Elementary School. Her head was hung low, her face covered with strings of frozen brown hair.
Even from across the field, Chase didn’t need to see the girl’s mouth to know that it would be smeared with blood, or to see the gash across her throat to know that it had been slit.
She parked her BMW and got out, her heart pounding. Detective Simmons had beat her to the scene, and he met her as she started to cross the field.
“Who discovered the body?” she
asked.
Simmons pointed to one of the brown brick houses that lined the road across from the field.
“Someone from one of those houses. Says they didn’t see anyone, just the body.”
Drake swore, and Chase looked over at him.
“This the way it was described?”
Drake nodded, ignoring the curious look that Simmons gave him.
“Pretty close.”
A horn blared from their right, and Chase turned in that direction. A pickup truck pulled to a stop by the edge of the field, and as she watched several women piled out.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
They appeared to be unraveling some sort of poster. As she watched, several other cars pulled up behind the pickup, and more people exited their vehicles. It took only a moment for Chase to realize what was happening.
“Cover the scene!” she yelled, breaking into a sprint. “Get a sheet up and cover the damn scene!”
The first poster unrolled at the same time the shouts started.
“They are victims! The women are not to blame!” the chorus rang out, piercing through the frosty air. “Women are not to blame!”
“Get a fucking screen up!” Chase yelled. Several of the uniformed officers looked at her, then the protesters, then the woman hanging from the goalpost. But none of them moved.
Chase grabbed the first officer she reached and spun him around.
“Put a damn screen up!”
The man glared at her.
“CSU isn’t here yet. They’re stuck in traffic. Going to be at least another twenty before they arrive.”
Chase turned her gaze upward.
“Shit!”
She knew that the press conference had been a mistake, and the dozens of calls that the call center had received had proven as much.
But she still hadn’t expected such a visceral outcry.
And now, with the body hanging in plain view, it was going to be on every social media site within the hour.
“Go to the body,” Drake said from her left. “Gather all of the officers on scene and go to the body. Stand around it. Her hair is in front of her face, but I want you to block all direct views of the body. And then get someone over to the protesters, push them to the other side of the road. This is a goddamn crime scene, not a circus.”
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