The Love Killings

by Robert Ellis

  He started kicking Day in the face and in the stomach, over and over again until he finally gave the man one last shot in the ass. Blood was streaming down the reporter’s face, his nose bent in such a way that it appeared broken. Andrew didn’t give a shit. When he spotted the canister on the carpet beside the reporter’s eyeglasses, he knelt down and snatched it up. It was pepper spray.

  Andrew shook his head as he felt the fury exploding through his body. He grimaced and groaned and painted Day’s face with coat after coat of pepper spray. Ignoring the toxic gas hovering in the air, he pried the reporter’s jaw open and emptied the canister in his mouth. Satisfied that Day had been neutralized, Andrew grabbed the reporter’s briefcase and ran down the hall back to the elevators.

  His hair was soaked through with sweat. He was hyperventilating and couldn’t catch his breath. The night had been so thrilling. So entertaining. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t stop shaking.

  CHAPTER 41

  Matt’s cell phone was vibrating on the bar. He saw Kate Brown’s name on the face and unlocked the phone.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t pick up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Doyle did a TV interview. I went with him to the studio. The story’s getting bigger, Jones.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Home,” she said. “The studio’s just a few blocks from my house. It’s still early. You want to come over?”

  “I’m at the Ritz. See you soon.”

  Matt cashed out his tab, left the bartender a decent tip, and walked out. His car was parked on a street close to Love Park, and within ten minutes he was knocking on Brown’s front door. A moment passed, and then another. When the door finally opened, he saw Brown’s sleepy smile and the gleam in her eye. She stepped aside to let him pass, then closed the door.

  She was wearing a short robe. And it was open so that Matt could see her bare chest and lavender-colored panties.

  “You got any bourbon?” he said.

  Her smile broadened while she thought it over. “As a matter of fact, I do. You want it on the rocks or straight up?”

  He could tell that she was playing a game. It felt good.

  “You decide,” he said.

  “Okay. How about a kiss first?”

  He moved closer and pulled her into his arms. He kissed her, and she kissed him back. He could feel his soul healing. He could see himself making a clean comeback.

  “Let’s get those drinks,” she said.

  “We need to talk about something.”

  “Okay.”

  He followed her into the kitchen. Brown kept a small bar in an antique wooden chest and grabbed the bourbon, then poured two glasses a couple of fingers high.

  “Let’s go straight up,” she said.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said with his eyes on her. “I met with Dr. Baylor this afternoon.”

  She flinched. “You what?”

  “We spoke this afternoon. We spent about a half hour together.”

  “At the Strattons’ mansion.”

  He nodded. He could see the worry showing on her face.

  “Why didn’t you arrest him?”

  “Because he had my gun.”

  “How did he know you were there?”

  He shrugged. “He followed me.”

  She passed over a glass, then tapped his with her own. Matt took a short sip, then walked with her into the living room. He stood and watched her curl her legs beneath her body on the couch. Matt took another sip and decided to sit in the chair.

  “He’s not good for these murders, Kate. He’s not even close to being good for them. I spoke with the undertaker today. Someone messed with the bodies while they were there. I told Rogers about it, not that I spoke with Baylor again, just the undertaker. He couldn’t care less. But I need your help. At some point the medical examiner will sign off on the Holloways and release their bodies. We need eyes on them, twenty-four seven. We need to know what’s going on, and we need to be there when it does.”

  She seemed confused—too much information, too fast.

  “You see where I’m going, Kate? We’ve got a chance to catch this guy. The real killer. We finally have something he wants. We’ve got a chance to end this, but we’ll be on our own.”

  She still seemed troubled. “What do you mean, messed with the bodies, Jones?”

  “The undertaker told me that he thought that the Strattons’ bodies had been disturbed. When I pressed him on it, he recanted. I think he got scared and lied, hoping it would go away.”

  She paused a moment, her wheels turning. When she finally spoke, her voice was quieter.

  “Come sit with me on the couch,” she said.

  Matt stepped around the coffee table and sat down close enough to put his arm around her. He watched her sip her drink and lean back.

  “You should’ve seen Doyle tonight,” she said. “The way he handled himself. The way he handled the news anchor.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She turned and gazed at him for a long time. “The story broke open tonight, Jones. With the funeral today, and the Holloways being murdered a week after the Strattons, it’s a bigger story now. A story that feels like it has a life of its own.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Andrew Penchant closed his bedroom door, ripped open Ryan Day’s briefcase, and dumped the contents on his worktable.

  He spread the file folders out and stared at them. They were paper files, not digital, and this surprised him. He didn’t find a laptop in the briefcase. And when he searched through the pockets, he didn’t see a calendar, an appointment book, or even an address book.

  Just a pair of shades, a pack of breath mints, and a small makeup kit.

  Day must have done most of his business with his cell phone and a computer tucked away in his hotel room. Andrew wondered why he hadn’t taken a moment to search for the gossip reporter’s cell phone. How much time would it have taken to frisk the idiot and grab his phone?

  He let the moment play in his head. He could see himself punching the man and kicking him after he went down. He could remember seeing all the blood spewing out of Day’s broken nose, then running down to the elevator. He liked seeing the blood. He liked the rush. But he’d had trouble catching his breath, and he didn’t understand why his perspiration was so profuse, or why he couldn’t stop shaking. It may have been the cloud of pepper spray hovering in the stagnant air, but he thought it might be more than that.

  Andrew shook off the memory, picked up the file folders, and checked the tabs. There were only three. One for the Strattons, another for the Holloways, and a third file dedicated to LAPD Detective Matt Jones.

  He grabbed Ryan Day’s file on Jones, sat down in his desk chair, and hit the switch on his surge protector, powering up his laptop, the lights, and the TV all at once. After checking the time, he muted the sound on the TV and started reading the file.

  It became clear from the dates that Ryan Day had been working on the story of Matt Jones’s life since the detective was shot six weeks ago. He was trying to solve the crime. He was searching for a motive to the shooting, as well as the identity of the man Jones had killed at the scene. Along the way, the gossip reporter sensed something was wrong with Jones’s background information and began digging.

  Jones shared his full name with three people of interest, but only one stood out. Andrew remembered overhearing the mad scientist call Matt’s father the King of Wall Street. According to Day’s file, he agreed with Dr. Baylor and had narrowed down his search to a power broker from New York City by the name of M. Trevor Jones. Day had put together side-by-side photographs of the detective with the banker. The likeness was indisputable, yet the banker claimed that he only had two children and both still lived with him and his wife at home.

  Andrew lowered the file to his worktable and settled back in the chair as he considered what he’d just read.

  Jones was the son of one of the wealthiest men on ea
rth. He could have lived a good life in a good world, but his father had stolen his identity from him when he wouldn’t even admit that the detective was his son.

  If Jones needed a reason to murder his father, that sounded like a good one. But what if it worked in reverse as well? What if the things he’d heard Dr. Baylor say were true? What if Jones’s father wanted to keep his past buried, and was trying to kill his own son?

  Andrew tossed it over as he thought about his own father. The pervert who had raped his mother when she was only fourteen. The man-devil whom he shared half his biological life with. He wondered if his father had ever thought about killing him. He wondered if a shot might not ring out when he least expected it. He could see himself falling to the ground. He could see himself bleeding out and dying like an animal at the hands of a child molester.

  This had to be the reason why Jones wanted to kill his father. M. Trevor Jones was a rich man living in a rich land and needed to be punished. The King of Wall Street needed to be stopped.

  It occurred to Andrew that he and Jones were brothers after all.

  He heard his mother tap on his bedroom door, and he pricked up his ears. She didn’t say anything, and after several moments, he heard her bedroom door close.

  That feeling in his stomach was back. All the churning. He dug the half-smoked joint out of his pocket. Then he lit up, took a hit, and held his breath until he started coughing. He heard his mother turn on the shower, and took a second hit. The eleven o’clock news had started on TV, but there was no mention of finding the gossip reporter on the nineteenth floor outside his hotel room.

  Andrew stood up and steadied himself against the worktable, the reefer storming his brain all at once. He sensed from the way the walls of his room appeared to blow out like sheets on a clothesline that the weed had been cut with something. When he had smoked opiated hash a few months ago, he experienced the same kind of hallucinations. Still, he couldn’t figure out how opium could possibly be blended with reefer. It had to be something else.

  He listened to the shower running and imagined his mother standing beneath the warm spill. He thought about her body, and the idea that she was still so young. Still so hot in that Northeast Philly kind of way.

  Andrew heard another tap and was surprised when the door opened. His mother walked in, dressed in a robe that was loosely tied around her waist and didn’t hide much skin.

  “I’m feeling lonely tonight,” she said in a quiet voice. “I could use a little TLC, honey.”

  He didn’t say anything. His mother’s eyes were burning, and she looked hungry again.

  “I need company,” she went on. “I need to be with someone right now.”

  He watched her gaze rise from his crotch to his face.

  “I hate you, Mother. I hate everything about you.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “I’ve hated you since before you were even born. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends tonight.”

  She took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom. The battery-powered candles were burning, the bed turned down. He could feel her undressing him as if he had become a little boy again. He watched her toss his shirt on the chair and unzip his jeans as if he were still a child.

  The weed had to be cut with something. Everything about his mother’s body seemed fresh and new, like just maybe she wasn’t his mother at all. Like tonight would be easier than ever to pretend. She smiled at him as she helped him out of his jeans.

  “That’s my boy,” she said. “Mommy’s so proud of you.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Matt heard something in the hallway and peered through the peephole while sipping his second mug of coffee of the day. The door was open to the apartment next door. A man was on his hands and knees collecting items he’d dropped and returning them to a canvas tote bag. The distance was too great, the lens too scratched, and Matt couldn’t tell what he was tossing into the bag.

  Curiously, this was someone new. Not the blond man in his late twenties or early thirties with a knapsack thrown over his shoulder, and not the middle-aged woman in the business suit who claimed she didn’t live here and was just dropping something off. Instead, this appeared to be a man of slight build in his midforties who wore eyeglasses and had shaved his head. But even more, once he got everything picked up, he closed the door to the apartment and locked it with a key. The man with blond hair had used a key as well.

  Matt realized that if he pulled his eye away right now, the man might notice the peephole change from dark to light, so he watched until the elevator arrived. When the man vanished inside and he heard the doors close, he turned away and took another sip of coffee.

  It was early. He couldn’t seem to sleep anymore. He’d left Brown’s place just after one in the morning. When he finally got in bed, he fell asleep quickly, but woke up an hour later. He fell asleep again, then woke up an hour after that. By 5:30 a.m., getting back to sleep seemed like a long shot, so he showered and shaved and got dressed.

  The TV was on in the living room, and a journalist was reporting from the Middle East. We’d already been at war for sixteen years, and it didn’t sound like anyone in the White House or on Capitol Hill had a plan to bring the troops home very soon. Matt didn’t care for politicians or their views about much these days. But more specifically, he didn’t like to hear them talk about war. Most of them had no idea what it was like to be at war. They never served and they possessed no knowledge or experience. Instead, they’d show up at hospitals with the cameras rolling, flash a phony smile, pretend to be concerned, and say thank you. After more than sixteen years, Matt didn’t think hearing a politician say thank you was good enough. Not nearly good enough.

  He stopped listening and tried to let his frustration subside as he topped off his coffee. And then the story on the news changed. The video feed switched from Kabul to Philadelphia.

  Matt walked into the living room.

  According to a reporter from CBS News, Ryan Day, the celebrity gossip reporter and host of the popular TV show Get Buzzed, had been attacked and robbed at his hotel in Philadelphia last night. Details were still sketchy, but detectives from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Major Crimes Section had gone through video from the hotel’s security system overnight. Several shots had been pulled of someone they described as a person of extreme interest.

  Matt moved closer to the TV for a better look. The first shot captured a man entering the hotel and following Day through the lobby. A second shot covered Day in the elevator with the same man. Although it was a close-up shot, detectives believed that the suspect had been aware of the camera’s location and deliberately kept his head down. But the third shot appeared to be the most telling. The suspect had returned to the lobby and was rushing toward the Market Street entrance with Ryan Day’s briefcase slung over his shoulder.

  Matt didn’t need three video shots to know what was going on. All he needed to see was a single image of the wool cap pulled over the man’s head.

  He set his coffee mug down on the table and waited for the reporter to end his piece, hoping that he was at the hospital and not the hotel. When they cut back to a live shot, the reporter was standing in front of the emergency room. Matt grabbed his jacket and scarf. The EMTs had taken Day to Jefferson University Hospital over on Tenth Street.

  Within fifteen minutes Matt had parked his car in the garage across the street and badged his way through security. The receptionist at the front desk was an elderly woman who came off like a volunteer and pointed out that visiting hours wouldn’t begin for two hours. When Matt identified himself as a deputy US marshal, she seemed more than pleased to help. Once Matt hit the elevators, he was free and clear.

  Day’s room was at the end of the hallway on the right. But once he reached the door, he caught a glimpse of the patient and thought he’d been given the wrong room number. Someone he couldn’t see was in the room as well, a woman, and she was saying something. Matt moved to the other side of the door and realized
that it was a doctor. She was giving her patient an update on his condition.

  Matt looked back at the man in the bed and tried to see through the gauze wrapped around his skull, the purple bruises tattooing his entire face, the swollen cheeks, and the fresh stitching that ran from the corner of his upper lip to the base of his nose. When he noticed the pair of wire-rimmed glasses on the tray, his eyes flicked back to the patient’s face.

  It had to be Ryan Day. Ryan Day after a brutal beating.

  Matt took a deep breath and exhaled. He might not have a name, but he knew that the man with the wool cap pulled over his head was more than a person of interest. He was certain of it now.

  A memory surfaced. It happened yesterday morning while he had been on his way to the Strattons’ funeral. He had been walking from his apartment to the parking garage when he turned and saw a man wearing dark shades waiting for the light to change. The man had blond cornrows. Last night, the man at the bar had been wearing a wool cap over his hair and had avoided eye contact.

  They were the same man. They had to be the same man.

  Matt guessed that the morning encounter had something to do with curiosity. But somehow the man with blond cornrows had skipped ahead and, for reasons unknown, returned to the death house in Radnor that afternoon. Even worse, the intruder had to have overheard his conversation with Dr. Baylor. He’d made a discovery, and learned that they had some idea of who he was. Some understanding of his background and plight.

  He had overheard Matt talking to Dr. Baylor and realized that they had a profile. They were looking for him now.

  It was the only explanation that made sense. The man with blond cornrows had been following Matt since he left the Strattons’ mansion because he had to keep tabs in order to stay safe. He had to keep tabs on Matt because he’d become the target of the hunt.

  He was no longer invisible. No longer on his own. And he needed information. Knowledge. He needed to know what they knew. He needed Ryan Day’s briefcase.