Brad’s expression softened.
“I know, I know. And that’s what I want, Chase. Come on, you know me, you know I don’t want to take him away from you. It’s just for a little while, anyway.”
“A little while? How long is a little while?”
“I don’t know for sure; a year, maybe two. Three tops.”
And that was it; Chase lost it.
She leaped at her ex-husband then, her hands held in front of her like the claws of a feral cat. Brad was taken by surprise and barely managed to get his hands up in time to protect himself.
The orderly, however, had anticipated this outburst and intervened before Chase could do anything but grab his shirt. The man was strong and easily pulled her back.
“What the fuck, Chase?” Brad said, standing and smoothing his shirt.
“You can’t take him,” Chase shouted. She redoubled her efforts to try to get to Brad then, but the orderly wrapped his thick arms around her waist and held fast.
Brad slowly started to make his way toward the door.
“You need to get well, Chase. You need to get yourself well and then we can talk about seeing Felix again. I’ll leave the number and everything you need to reach him, but please, get well first. He’s been through a lot and he’s fragile. He misses his mommy, sure, but you don’t want him to see you like this.”
Brad moved to the door and pulled it wide.
Dr. Matteo stood not ten feet from the entrance, his arm resting on Felix’s shoulder. The boy looked at her then, and she saw incredible sadness in his eyes.
“You can’t take him,” Chase whispered.
Brad walked over to Felix and his arm quickly replaced Dr. Matteo’s on the boy’s shoulder. And then, without even giving her chance to say goodbye, he turned her son around and started to walk away.
“You can’t take him!” Chase screamed. She tried to squirm loose again, but her efforts were useless. “No, you can’t take him! Georgie! Georgie don’t go with him! Run, Georgie, run! Scream and run, Georgie! Don’t get in the van!”
Chapter 12
“I’m fine,” Chase spat as the orderly thrust her back into her dorm.
The orderly, who hadn’t said anything during the entire ordeal, continued to remain silent. But the man’s face, his round and pink and somehow offensive face, said it all: You’re not fine, and if you continue to not be fine, I’ll give you the same sedative that I gave Randy.
Still seething, her blood boiling, and yet not seeing a way out of this that didn’t end up with her being in an induced coma, Chase threw her hands in the air.
“Give me some god damn privacy, would you?”
The orderly gave her another look, but eventually acquiesced to her request and left her alone in the room.
Only after the door was firmly closed did Chase allow her emotions to overwhelm her. Only it wasn’t rage or frustration anymore, or even fear. Now it was only one solitary emotion that polluted her soul: guilt.
Chase’s guilt manifested as body racking sobs and tears that fell like Niagara Falls.
“Fuck,” she muttered in a slobbery mess.
She went to the mirror and stared at her reflection. She looked like a completely different person than earlier in the day.
“Fuck,” she repeated.
Everything I touch, everybody I’ve ever cared about, suffers.
Without thinking, Chase found herself unscrewing the top to the cold-water tap. She flipped it over and stared at the pills wadded up in toilet paper and buried inside.
Her fingers worked on their own accord now, unpacking the pills and putting them on her tongue. She swallowed the first one dryly, as well as the next two. The fourth was considerably more difficult and the fifth made her gag. Chase ended up spitting this pill back into her palm and then had to turn on the hot water to slurp it down.
The sixth pill hadn’t made it to her lips before there was a knock at the door.
Chase wiped her face with the back of her arm, and for the briefest of moments, she thought that it was Brad coming back, coming to tell her that he had changed his mind. That he was going to take her out of this godforsaken place and bring her home so that they could be a family once more.
But her family had been taking from her long before she had ever met Brad, or even thought about having a child of her own.
Chase squeezed the pill tightly in her palm and opened the door.
It wasn’t Brad; in fact, it was the last person she expected.
It was Louisa, complete with gauze stuffed into each nostril and eyes that had already started to darken with a bruise.
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened, Chase, but—”
The woman stopped abruptly, her eyes skipping to Chase’s own, to the sink which was still running, to her clenched fist.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the woman demanded. Chase was still furious at Louisa, but her reaction was so strange that she took a step backward.
This sealed her fate.
The woman rushed at her, taking Chase by surprise. Before she knew what was happening, Louisa had her pushed up against the sink. Her fingers were pried open next, and the tablet fell into the sink and then down the drain.
“No,” Chase tried to say, not because she was losing the pill — she still had plenty of those — but because for some reason she was inexplicably worried that Dr. Matteo, or maybe even Nurse Whitfield, would find it.
This made no sense, of course, given what she had already consumed.
But the word barely made it out of her mouth, on account of the fact that Louise’s fingers were on their way in. Bent over at the waist, the porcelain sink cutting into her hips, Chase vomited into the sink.
At first, it was only the water she’d consumed with the last pill that came up, but as Louisa’s fingers scraped along the roof of her mouth, and then throttled her uvula, up came the pills.
As she retched, Chase realized that Louisa was saying something, that she was saying the same thing over and over and over again.
“You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this.”
When Chase, through blurred vision noticed that there were six pills in the sink, she bucked her hips, knocking Louise backward.
Then she whipped around and stared at the woman, no longer filled with rage, but with something else.
The woman had just saved her life. Why, Chase had no clue.
“I came to tell you that you have a visitor,” Louisa said.
Chase was confused. Did she mean Felix and Brad? Did she mean the meeting that they’d already had?
As if reading her mind, Louisa shook her head.
“No, a uniform type — someone like you.”
Chase’s confusion only deepened
“A unif—”
And then she saw him. He looked tired, but his medium length brown hair was perfectly coiffed, just as she remembered.
Chase blinked several times, and then wiped her eyes. The tears were gone, but the mirage remained.
She opened her mouth to say something, but for the second time in as many minutes, Louisa gripped her shoulders and pulled her close.
“When this is over, whatever this is, we need to talk. Like I said before, we have something in common. A lot. And I think I can help you.”
“What?” Chase asked. But Louisa had already let her go and was moving towards the door. The woman nodded at the man as he approached Chase’s dorm, and he returned the gesture.
Then he entered.
The two of them locked eyes for a moment, neither saying a word. And then Chase broke; she stepped forward and embraced him. He, in turn, wrapped his arms around her, gave her a quick squeeze, and then released.
“Chase, we need you back,” FBI Agent Jeremy Stitts said. “I need you back.”
PART II – Restitution
THIRTY-SIX HOURS AGO
Chapter 13
Chase inhaled sharply.
It had bee
n a good four or five months since she’d seen a dead body, and a long time before that since she’d seen so many in one place, if ever.
The room was large, but so far as Chase could tell, it wasn’t of the typical variety designed for sleeping. For one, there were no beds to speak of; in fact, aside from the overturned poker table and ergonomic chairs, and what appeared to be a semi-permanent bar erected in one corner, there was no furniture at all. The room was a simple square that was drenched in blood.
The crimson liquid soaked the green felt of the poker table and speckled all four walls. An expensive bottle of tequila had been smashed at the neck and lay on its side atop the bar. Tequila slowly dripped from the bottle’s jagged opening and, mixing with the blood on the bar, made for a slow pink drip that seemed almost hypnotic as it fell to the floor and soaked the carpet.
“Eleven victims,” Stitts reminded her, and Chase turned away from the bottle. “Seven players, the dealer, bartender, and two security guards.”
Chase nodded and made her way deeper into the room; despite going over the preliminary file multiple times on the plane, and then again in the car on the way from the airport to The Emerald Hotel and Casino, she tried to see the scene with a fresh set of eyes.
The bartender was lying on his back behind the bar, his face so covered in blood and riddled with bullet holes that it was unrecognizable. He was lying on his back, his arms out at his sides, shattered bottles all around him. The poker players were scattered around the toppled table like dolls. The dealer was located closest to where he sat during the game, his body more or less wedged in the groove cut from the table. He was sitting cross-legged, which Chase thought odd, and his head was slumped all the way forward to the floor, which caused his back to arch unnaturally.
There was a single bullet hole in the back of his head.
Chase walked slowly around the carnage, careful to avoid most of the blood splatter that the hazmat-clad CSI members were either in the process of photographing or sampling. As she moved, Chase tried to piece together the order of events that had led to such carnage, her eyes moving first to the door from where she’d come in, to the security guards next. The two men, large, muscular fellows dressed in black suits, lay toward the back of the room near a row of thick, yellow-tinted windows. Chase indicated the security detail with her chin, both of whom had been shot multiple times both in the chest and neck and face.
Stitts followed her over to them, and Chase knelt next to the larger of the two men, who was collapsed on his side.
“What is it?” Stitts asked. This was his refrain, of course; to ask questions and to wait for answers. Not to make assumptions or assertions even if he already knew the answer.
“The door’s over there,” Chase said, pointing back the way they had come in. “There’s no other entrance or exit to this room.”
Despite its odd phrasing, she’d meant the comment as a statement and not a question, and Stitts saw it as such.
“So why are they over here if they’re supposed to be guarding the money and players? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to stand closer to the door?”
Stitts nodded and called for one of the CSI techs. A man with slicked black hair sporting a white plastic suit hurried over to them.
The man stared at Chase for a moment.
“Yes, Agent Adams?” the tech asked.
Chase’s brow furrowed; she hadn’t announced her presence or introduced herself to anyone but the Sgt. who had led them to the room.
Keep it together, Chase. He probably just recognized you from one of the many stupid things that you’ve done in the past.
She pushed these thoughts from her mind and pointed at the man’s left hand, which still clutched a semi-automatic 9mm pistol.
“Can you tell if his gun has been fired?”
The CSI tech removed a swab from a pouch on his hip, and he wiped the barrel of the gun with it. A second later, he showed it to her.
It was dark from GSR.
“Check to see if the other guy fired his gun,” Chase instructed.
Although there were bullet holes everywhere — high-power rounds embedded in the walls and the victims — there was only one in particular that she was looking for.
As her eyes drifted around the room, Chase was consciously aware that Stitts was staring at her.
Let him stare, she thought.
She was used to people staring at her, watching as she twitched and shook then vomited on herself, all the while begging for her next fix.
Chase bit the inside of her cheek again, drawing her back to the present.
“Where are you…” she whispered. “Where are you?”
And then, just as her eyes started to grow tired, she found it: the bullet from the security detail’s gun. Only it was in one of the last places Chase expected.
Instead of near the door, which would make sense given that that was the only direction from which the assailant or assailants could have entered the room, Chase found the bullet embedded in the ceiling behind her.
She pointed at the small crater near where the wall of windows met the ceiling, and Stitts’s brow furled.
“Why would… you think he was falling maybe, squeezed off a round as he was going down?” Stitts asked after a pause.
Chase thought about this for a moment before shaking her head. It didn’t make sense. In a game of this magnitude, with ten or more million dollars on the line, all of which appeared to have gone missing, The Emerald wouldn’t use rent-a-cops. They’d hire highly trained security.
Chase rose to her feet and made her way over to the bartender once more.
Of all the victims, it appeared that this one was either the target or had somehow raised the ire of the killer.
As she hovered over the poor man’s body, the room darkened, and the rustling of the CSI techs, the dictation by some forensic pathologist on the scene, and even her own breathing seemed to go quiet.
Chase squatted by the bartender’s outstretched arm and noticed that his hands were a mess — the fingers on both hands ragged from shattered glass.
But she had no interest in his hands.
Chase took a deep, shuddering breath and reached for him. A split-second before she made contact, Stitts’s palm came down on her shoulder.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked in a quiet voice.
Chase looked over at her partner. His face was slack and his eyes wide.
The man cared… he cared too much.
Chase took another deep breath and nodded.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
And then she touched the corpse’s bare skin.
Chapter 14
Shock crossed over Chase’s features.
Nothing happened.
Swallowing hard, she gripped the man’s cold flesh a little tighter. In her periphery, she saw Stitts lean forward, and she closed her eyes as if she were seeing a vision. Before, back in Alaska, and then Boston and Chicago, all she had to do was touch the corpses, and Chase was ushered away to another world, her mind reconstructing the scenario that led to their murder. It wasn’t clairvoyance or voodoo as Stitts liked to joke, but a reconstruction of the evidence that her subconscious picked up on, but that Chase wasn’t aware of.
Only not this time; this time, nothing happened.
Chase moved her fingers a little, trying to ensure that she had enough skin to skin contact.
And then she tried to picture the man holding the bottle of tequila, smiling, getting ready to pour a drink when the door exploded inward and the bullets started flying.
Only in her mind, the vision Chase created seemed like a cartoon or an over-the-top action film and not reality.
“It doesn’t look like the other security guard fired his weapon.”
Chase opened her eyes and nodded at the tech.
Then she turned to Stitts and, not sure what else to do, gave him a curt nod as well.
Trying to hide he
r confusion, she rose to her feet and stretched her back.
“We need backgrounds and histories on everybody here — everyone from the dealer, to the players, to the security guards,” Chase said.
Stitts stared at her curiously for a moment before replying.
Drawing Dead (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 3) Page 5
