Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  I reconstructed quite a few gruesome murders in my time as an IBI agent, but DuPont’s demise was downright sickening. The sheer level of pain he must have experienced in a minute and a half…more than he’d felt total in his entire life. And the fear would have been paralyzing, heart-attack-inducing on its own. The sound of that monster’s footsteps drawing closer as he writhed on the ground, unable to flee.

  Whoever wanted DuPont dead wanted him to suffer. Wanted his final moments to be the worst any human being could experience. The storm and the monster hiding within were the most creative implements the killer could think up for the task. We’re dealing with a sadist here.

  Someone knocks on the scratch-marked doorframe of the lab, and I glance up to see Murrough. His towering form comes to a point a few inches below the top of the threshold. The monster was taller than his bulky six-foot-four. It must’ve been eight to nine feet in height and broader than the average car. Its hefty feet left cracks and dents in the cheap tile flooring as it stalked. Five hundred pounds, easy. Five hundred pounds of killer intent all aimed at one college boy.

  What the hell could this guy have done to earn that?

  I slip off the table, shoes crunching debris, and nod at Murrough. “What do you need?”

  He juts a thumb over his shoulder. “Chai’s here. Dynara sent her to the offices to interview a dean and a professor who were in the building when it happened. She wants you on it, too.”

  “Dynara wants me? Or Chai?” It’s hard to growl a “ch” sound, but somehow, my throat manages.

  Murrough shrugs his shoulders. “Does it matter? You’re going. You do what you’re ordered to. That’s the deal, man. You sold your soul when you signed the NDA.”

  “Thanks for the reminder, pal.”

  “Any time.” He sweeps the back of his gloved hand against his forehead, wiping a streak of white dust from his darker skin. “You get the goods from your little mind voodoo?”

  “I got enough to know we’re dealing with someone who had a personal vendetta against Mark DuPont. So you can scratch random act of violence and wrong place, wrong time off the list of possibilities. The killer knew Mark was here and that he was alone in this section of the building and that no one else was close enough to this hallway to stumble upon the dream attack in progress. If I was to guess, I’d say the maker was nearby before the echo commenced, or we’re looking at a tag team: a maker with a real-world spotter to keep watch.”

  “Organized murderers?” Murrough groans. “Fantastic. Just what we need to brighten up the holiday season.”

  “Tell me about it. Now I have mortal danger and a holiday party filled with sworn enemies to look forward to.” I shuffle past my stoic teammate, into the storm-battered hallway, where EDPA crowd control guards the corners, the doors, the broken windows, and a strike team led by May waits, breath bated, for any sudden shift in the situation requiring their specialties.

  Murrough snorts. “The hell kind of enemies do you have, Adamend?”

  “A hundred and one IBI agents I left in the dust. Those assholes in Homicide relied on me to do the heavy lifting whenever their fancy analysis programs failed to come up with the answers the easy way. Right after I left, I started getting anonymous threatening messages in my government profile inbox, despite the fact that my profile was given two additional layers of restriction when I joined EDPA. Seems someone thought it’d be a swell plan to employ a couple of Cyber Security guys to slip some hate mail through the back door. Funnily enough, though, I have my own Cyber Sec guy at my beck and call—took Jin all of two minutes to trace down the senders.”

  A scowl warps Murrough’s scruffy face. “Sheesh. Got to love those IBI pricks, huh? What’d you do? Report them to Briggs?”

  “That was the plan. But Jin came up with a ‘better’ one and acted on it before I could.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “Well, seeing as the threat senders in question are still trying to get their private information back from the identity theft market…I wouldn’t.”

  Murrough stares at me for a second with his impenetrable near-black eyes, then turns on his squeaky boots and storms off down the hall, muttering to himself a long rant that begins with, “I swear to every old god in creation…”

  When he stomps around a corner and vanishes, I head the other direction, up two flights of stairs and down a long, poorly lit hallway to a row of staff offices on the top floor of the building. In the third office on the right, I locate three figures moving about behind the slanted white blinds in front of the window cut into the door. The door itself is halfway closed, and voices filter from the room into the quiet hallway, abandoned save for me and two bored EDPA agents assigned to watch the floor where nothing happened in case something happens.

  I lightly rap on the door with my knuckles, pushing it open farther at the same time. In the cramped office are two women and a man.

  The man is pushing a hundred ten, hair white, face wrinkled around the eyes and mouth, back beginning to bend under the strain of a life sitting at desks with poor posture. The dean.

  The woman next to him, at least four decades younger, is an unnaturally pale-skinned modder with bright green hair and violet eyes, an animated tattoo curling around one wrist. It’s a scorpion, the tattoo, and at random six- to twelve-second intervals, its barbed tail moves along the surface of the woman’s skin, striking at an invisible foe. The professor.

  On the opposite side of the desk where the college employees are seated stands a woman with light brown skin, dark brown eyes, and a wicked smirk. As I walk inside, she twirls a lock of her springy black hair and lets it go, the piece bouncing twice before it comes to rest atop her cheekbone. Then, with a go-lucky expression fit for a front office HR secretary, Chai Bennett ushers me into the cramped office space strewn with collected detritus from years of teaching mid-level computer science.

  “Adem, glad you could make it!” says Chai in her Texan drawl. “Y’all, this is Adem Adamend, our newest agent. He was one of the best CSI analysts over at the IBI, and now we’ve got him working this case for us. So don’t y’all worry. He’ll do us good.”

  The dean stands and offers his hand. “Glad to meet you, Agent.”

  I shake it, testing his grip and skin. Sweaty. Shaky. He’s nervous. But the fear doesn’t permeate the rest of his body, shoulders steady, face genuine and genial, wearing only a hint of concern. He’s not as rattled as you would expect an oblivious man to be after stumbling upon the mutilated body of a student.

  I smile and reply, “You as well, Dean…?”

  “Pat Anderson. I oversee the engineering and computer science majors here at the college.”

  The professor doesn’t rise for the occasion, nor does she offer a handshake. Instead, she says, “You look a bit young for government work.”

  “I have four PhDs.” My usual stuck-up, smart-boy answer to get ageist oldies off my case.

  “Huh.” Her flat expression doesn’t change. She’s not impressed. Not even interested.

  Well, there’s a first time for everything.

  “And you are…?” I prompt.

  “Sally Castile. I teach Data Structures and Finite Automata.” She picks up a coffee mug on the desk and takes a sip of something orange that smells like drain cleaner. Smacking her lips, she adds, “I have six PhDs, in case you were wondering.”

  Chai bites her lip to stifle a laugh.

  I glare at her.

  Not that my nastiest glares work on Chai Bennett.

  Nothing works on Chai Bennett.

  Because Chai Bennett, the fifth member of Night Team One’s five-man band, is an award-winning, steel-skinned, hard-hearted psychiatrist. Which no one bothered to mention to me until I walked up to her three weeks back, the day she returned from her honeymoon, and introduced myself. At which point she promptly gave me an in-depth play-by-play of every mental and emotional problem she could just tell I had based on the stupid, slack-jawed expression on my face.

 
; Now, in the awkward confines of this stuffy office, I clap my hands and say, “So, let’s get down to business.”

  Chai Bennett grins even wider. A promise to torment me.

  Good Gods, I hate psychiatrists.

  * * *

  The professor who’s unimpressed with my credentials is the one who starts to spin the tale. While Chai and I sit across from her and the dean in squeaky plastic chairs, she recounts her morning grading exams in this cramped, musty office: “It was nearing lunchtime, and I had a date coming up with a few friends of mine in town for the holidays. At that new restaurant on the corner of Eighteenth and Monroe. The ‘authentic old world Mexican’ establishment that’s been in all those commercials recently. Forgot the name. Something in a dead language.”

  “La Cocina?” I offer. “It’s Spanish.”

  “Yeah, that.” The professor waves her hand, and the scorpion on her arm attacks the air again. “Point is, I was packing my stuff for the lunch hour, tallying up my last exam—a total bomb, let me tell you—when out of nowhere, I hear this noise. At first, I’m thinking static, like you hear on those radios coming back into style with the retro crowd. But then I get up and go out into the hall so I can hear it better, and I realize it sounds less like static and more like sand blowing in the wind. Sand. Inside a computer science building. The hell?”

  Dean Anderson picks up the story. “My office is at the end of the hall. I was on an important personal call when I first heard the noise, and I ignored it for a couple of minutes, thinking it was kids getting up to shenanigans or some kind of maintenance, something I could deal with at a later time. Then Sally came knocking at my door.” His hand brushes the professor’s shoulder in a motion meant to look intimate on a friend level, but it lacks the actual warmth and ease behind a friendly gesture. Dean Anderson and Professor Castile are not well acquainted, but the former, at least, wants Chai and me to believe they are. Why? What purpose would that illusion serve?

  Chai nudges my boot with her own to signal she’s noticed it, too—the little white lie building across the desk from us—but her face is an unchanged half-smile of encouragement. This is her zone of influence, what she trained for during med school and on junior rotation at Houston’s largest psychiatric facility. Reading between the lines that form when people speak and act. She does what I do, analyzes people, but she does it as a discipline and a drive, not as a default. And I wonder if perhaps that makes her more dangerous than less.

  “So Pat and I,” Castile says, adjusting herself in her rickety desk chair, “headed downstairs, trying to find the source of this god-awful noise. It was so damn loud we couldn’t even hear ourselves talking. By the time we hit the right floor, I was afraid it was going to damage my hearing, but then…”

  Anderson gnaws at his cuticles and drops his gaze to Castile’s messy desk. “It stopped. Just like that. Dead silence fell over the entire building. Sally and I were almost too afraid to exit the stairwell and see what had happened, but this building, despite its age, is still the center of the college’s largest major, so we had to press on. We can’t let threats to the building go unchecked. Not until the budget for the total restoration is approved by the Washington Education Board anyway.”

  Chai bobs her head, and her curls bounce ten different directions. “Of course, Dean Anderson. Go on.”

  The man tugs at his tie and throws a weak smile at Castile, who (sort of) attempts to return the expression in a way that reminds me of rusted piano wire bent at a too-sharp angle. Anderson coughs, his throat dry, and continues, “Obviously, we were…horrified when we saw the hallway. Ruined. Everything ruined.”

  “It looked like someone had come through with a faulty sandblaster,” Castile throws in.

  “Yes.” Anderson shakes his head. “I don’t understand how anyone could have done that much damage in so little time, but I suppose that’s your job to figure out, not mine?”

  Chai and I both nod in time.

  “Right.” The dean rubs his chin, lips stretching into a thin grimace. “Anyway, we just stood there dumbly for a few minutes before we thought to check the rooms for any lingering students. It was Sally who found Mr. DuPont in the lab.”

  Castile shivers at the memory, and though she, like her companion, doesn’t appear nearly as shocked as I would expect a person to be after stumbling upon a decapitated corpse, a shadow of true horror crosses her face. She screws her violet eyes shut and clenches her fists. “Never in all my life did I expect to see one of my students like that. Mark DuPont. Top of my Finite Automata class. Total perfectionist though. Way too strung out. Acted like the world would tip over if he got a B.” She presses the back of her hand over her mouth. “Old gods be with us, to see that kid ripped apart…ugh.”

  Anderson makes a vain attempt to pat her shoulder in a comforting manner. “And that’s our story, Agents. That’s how it happened.”

  Chai scoots her chair back a few inches, metal legs screeching against the tile, and offers her hand to the dean. “Well, thank y’all so much for your time. And I’m very sorry y’all had to go through such a shock today. If anything else comes to mind, any details about the scene or any little events that might’ve been skipped over by accident, please call us at the profile I gave y’all earlier and ask to speak to Chai Bennett.”

  “You have my word, Agent.” The dean rises, and with him, the rest of us. “I speak for all my faculty and staff when I say that attacks against this college and its students will not be tolerated. We’ve suffered the terrible loss of a bright young man today, and this building, the college’s oldest, has suffered what may be irreparable damage, endangering other students’ educations. If there’s any other way I can contribute to bringing this murderer to justice, don’t hesitate to call me.”

  “We won’t, Dean Anderson.” I stuff my hands in my pockets and refuse to engage in pleasantries again while Chai goes through another round of handshakes. The professor and dean linger in place as Chai and I retreat toward the door, the former staring bullets into the back of my head, the latter rubbing his short, white beard, over and over, a nervous tic. Chai scoots on through the narrow doorway, and I make to follow her, to rid myself of the presence of the worst liars I have come across in the better part of a year, when Castile speaks one last time:

  “Hey, Agent Redhead. What exactly does your EDPA organization do? What makes it different from the IBI?” The weight of the tone she uses on the word different gives me pause, and I glance at her reflection, cut into slices, on the blind-shaded window set into the office door. Arms crossed, lips tight, green brows furrowed. A simple, three-step recipe for suspicion on a human face.

  I stop in the doorway and reply, “Nothing much. We just take on cases that have an odd flair or two. Kind of like your modder getup, Professor Castile.” My fingers tighten around the tarnished metal doorknob, and I tug the door shut behind me as I march off down the hall to catch up with a quick-walking Chai. I don’t hear another peep from the office.

  When we round the corner, Chai throws up a hand to stop me, twirls around on her toes, and chuckles. “Good Gods Almighty, what do you think those two were hiding?”

  I start to button my coat and shrug. “If only it was as easy to guess secrets in an echo case as it is during a standard murder investigation. But I do have a few ideas.”

  “Care to share?” She wiggles her eyebrows.

  “I’m pretty sure our ideas overlap at least ninety percent, Chai.”

  “Fine, boy. Be that way. I’ll start: they rehearsed their little tale ahead of time.”

  “Obviously.” I duck under Chai’s arm and push through the stairwell door. “But the question is: what do they have to hide that would require them to do so?”

  She follows me onto the stairs, and we descend toward the ground floor. “Could be they’re involved with DuPont’s death in some way. One of them is the maker and had it out for our victim? The other is an accomplice?”

  “Didn’t get that vibe off eith
er of them, and the dean, despite being a flake, is one of those right proper snooty types. Notice his emphasis on taking care of the building? He wouldn’t have done this sort of damage to it, no matter who he had a vendetta against, and he wouldn’t have let anyone else do it either.” I turn on the landing and almost trip down a warped step, but I grab the handrail in time to prevent a neck-breaking fall.

  Chai snickers.

  “It’s nice to see you care so much about my wellbeing.”

  Her hand slaps my shoulder. “Don’t be such a downer, Adem. Especially when I agree with you. I don’t think they’re our perpetrators. I only threw that idea out so we could polish off the reasons why they don’t fit—because you know Dynara is going to grill us about it.”

  She takes the lead on the stairs, and I follow. “True that. So let’s round it out. The dean is definitely not our guy, and he can’t be the professor’s accomplice because he would never have allowed her to deal so much damage to his beloved building. Plus, the two of them don’t know each other that well. I’d guess they haven’t spoken much outside of monthly faculty meetings and required campus functions.”

  Chai grabs the handle for the door at the bottom of the stairs and heaves it open, revealing the wide hall beyond. “And you don’t team up for such a visceral, personal murder with someone you aren’t sure you can trust.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So if they’re not responsible for the killing, then why were they lying by the seat of their pants?”

  We stroll through the bottom floor corridor, EDPA agents milling about as they pack up equipment and talk amongst themselves about their findings at the scene. By this point, Lab 420 will have been scrubbed clean, all the vital collected evidence sent back to the office for analysis. There will be nothing left inside to suggest that a student was brutally murdered there, a young life extinguished through ultra-violence. No one will smell the blood once stuck to every surface. No one will hear the echoes of DuPont’s screams in the hall. People will wonder, people will mourn the loss of a friend or a classmate…and then they’ll move on none the wiser to the fate that befell him.