He looked over at Chase, and hoped that she got his mental message to keep the presence of the caterpillar to themselves for now. They had discussed this issue after speaking to Beckett again, who had since confirmed that the caterpillar in question was a Monarch, and it had been up in the air as to whether or not they should mention it to the other detectives. Chase was all for it, but Drake had his reservations. They had decided to play it by ear, and now, seeing what seemed to be the faces of strangers staring back at him, he had gone with his initial instinct.
They would find out, but not right now. He couldn’t chance this information being leaked to the media. He had a sinking feeling in his guts that some of the detectives that he had once called friends, but now looked at him with distaste, might let it leak just to get back at him for what had happened.
After all, they may have been his friends once, but Drake had no doubts that when it came down to it, they had much preferred the smile and calm demeanor of Clay Cuthbert to his brashness and straightforward nature.
“Chase will now go into more detail about the witness, a junkie named Rachel Adams, no relation, and her account of what happened. If there are any questions, I’ll—”
The glass door to the conference room opened, and Drake was surprised to see Sergeant Rhodes’s small eyes buried behind round spectacles peer in.
“Chase will be heading the investigation,” he said curtly, his gaze locking on Drake.
Disdain, distaste, and something else… something more visceral.
“If you have any questions, direct them to her.”
There were several murmurs, and Drake felt his face start to redden.
“Drake, my office,” Rhodes finished before grimacing and allowing the door to close.
Drake’s ears felt like they were on fire again.
He had known that coming back would be somewhat of a transition, that he might have to regain the trust of some of his colleagues, but he hadn’t known that their scorn had run this deep. And Sergeant Tom Rhodes had quashed all of his efforts with an ill-timed interruption.
Drake cleared his throat and fought the urge to curse out loud.
Get a grip, he admonished himself, recalling the episode with Suzan’s psychiatrist.
What a fucking day this was becoming, and it wasn’t even dinner yet.
He cleared his throat and raised his chin.
“Right, all questions to Chase,” he said without looking over at her. “And remember, no media leaks. Keep in mind that there is a dead man here—he’s a victim and despite eight-hundred-dollar alligator loafers, he demands the same respect as anyone from your family.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted his choice.
Family. We—NYPD Detectives—had been a family once.
Clay had been family. As had Suzan.
Then Drake started to move toward the door as Chase started to recount the story that he had heard Rachel Adams recount a half-dozen times already.
He had to snake his way between the detectives to exit the conference room; no one moved out of the way to allow him to pass.
CHAPTER 8
“To say you’re on thin ice is like saying a polar bear is just a large albino kitty,” Sergeant Rhodes said.
Drake screwed up his face, no longer able to keep his emotions from bubbling to the surface. His relationship with Sergeant Rhodes had always been strained, what with the man more concerned with his reputation and ambitions, which, if the rumors were true, extended even beyond just the NYPD. But Drake, a no-nonsense man who solved more homicides than just about anyone else in the department, was also an asset, and he knew it. And aspiring men likes Rhodes needed someone like Drake. So long as he kept the media out of their affairs, Rhodes didn’t even seem to bat an eyelash when Drake stretched the rules. After all, Drake wasn’t like that fat idiot Steven Britt who had six convictions overturned for punching suspects in the face. And, besides, when things had deteriorated between them, Drake always had Clay to step in.
He had Clay; as in past tense.
The sergeant leaned forward, his elbows planting on his desk like spindly roots, his long, thin fingers interlacing.
“You’re back for one reason, Drake: Internal Affairs said there was no way to get rid of you,” he nodded to a manila folder sitting in the center of the large oak desk. “You remember what I said? I said, think carefully before your psych exam? You remember that?”
Drake simply stared at the man, watching his Adam’s apple slide up and down in his throat with obscene fascination.
The truth was, everything immediately following Clay’s murder was a blur, a dirty smudge of reality obscured by copious amounts of whiskey and even more sleepless nights. And yet Drake thought he did remember Rhodes saying something along these lines. Only at the time, he had considered it a kind of, get well soon and come back to us, statement.
Only now did Drake realized how very wrong he was.
The two men stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity drawn out like sugar taffy.
Drake was afraid to answer; afraid because he thought that the only response that he could manage was one of fury.
Is he forgetting that Clay was my partner? My best friend?
The faces of his fellow detectives came to mind then, the way they had looked at him first in the alley behind Luther Street and then in the conference room moments ago.
They can’t all blame me for what happened to Clay, can they?
He shuddered.
Why wouldn’t they? A small voice inside his head chimed in. After all, don’t you blame yourself, Drake? Why wouldn’t they?
Eventually Rhodes broke the silence.
“Chase will be heading the Clinton Hill investigation—she’ll be reporting directly to me. You’ll tag along and give her any and all support she needs to solve the murder. But that’s it. That’s the extent of your involvement. I want you to be a silent partner on this one; keep your interactions with suspects and witnesses to a minimum, and for Christ’s sake Drake, you are not to speak to the media in any capacity. Do you understand?”
Drake swallowed hard and nodded.
“Good,” Rhodes leaned forward and pointed directly at the center of his chest. “You slip up once, just once, and you’ll be lucky if your next assignment is giving out parking tickets in Long Island, I don’t care what IA has to say. Do you understand?”
This time Drake didn’t offer anything as a response; no head nod, not so much as a blink.
He was suddenly struck with the idea that Chase taking over the case the day he returned to work was no accident, no coincidence. This was part of a bigger strategy, one that Rhodes was at the heart of, one that was designed to get Drake as far away from 62nd precinct as possible.
Parking tickets in Long Island…
Rhodes wasn’t being facetious; that was exactly where he wanted Drake. After what had happened to Clay and the subsequent New York Times exposé about the Skeleton King, Drake had burnished Brooklyn Homicide and the 62nd precinct with a nasty, swollen black eye.
And this type of thing just didn’t jive with Sergeant Rhodes and his damn aspirations.
Drake suddenly wished that this morning when he had thrown the man in the V-neck and sport coat against the hood of his BMW that it had been Rhodes’s razor thin nose that had been bloodied.
Thoughts of earlier in the day also brought back echoes of Suzan’s words.
You ruined everything!
Drake bowed his head and started to stand, aware that Rhodes was still staring at him, but no longer caring.
He half-expected the man to stop him on his way to the door, to utter another not-so veiled threat. But Rhodes didn’t, and Drake left the Sergeant’s office with his head still hung low.
~
Chase was waiting outside the Sergeant’s office when Drake stepped into the hallway. She had something between a grimace and a look of solemnity etched on her pretty face. Drake nodded an acknowledgment
and she sidled up beside him as he made his way toward his office.
“You alright?” she asked quietly, cognizant of peering eyes and perked ears.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
“You know that—”
Drake silenced her by holding up a hand. The fact was, he knew that—he knew what she was going to say. Young as Detective Adams was, she seemed very much in tune with what was going on around him and the station. And for some reason, she didn’t let it faze her.
He liked that.
“I’m fine. I’m just here to solve a murder.” When her eyes softened, Drake’s did as well. “But I appreciate it.” he said.
This time it was her turn to nod.
They made their way down the hall, both aware that nearly everyone they passed was staring at them, but this seemed to bother Chase even less than Drake.
He liked that about her, too.
“So what now?” Chase asked.
Drake smiled.
“You’re the boss, you tell me.”
She made a playful hmph sound, realizing at once that he was making a joke.
“You hear back from Beckett?” she asked after they had made it to his office door. One of the slots still read DAMIEN DRAKE, HOMICIDE, but while his name had always been on top and Clay’s beneath it, Clay’s had since been removed and Damien’s was now on the bottom. The top slot was empty.
He wondered if this too had been part of Rhodes plan.
“No, not yet,” he said, reaching for the handle. He paused and turned to face her. “Hey, let me ask you something… you wouldn’t happen to have a cell phone charger, would you?”
She squinted.
“What kind?”
Drake slid a hand into his pocket, and fingered the phone within.
“Step inside, there’s something I need to show you,” he said, this time holding the door for her.
CHAPTER 9
“You took the man’s phone?” Chase asked, her tone matching the shocked expression on her face.
Drake held the cell phone out to her as if to say, yep, and here it is. But Chase was having none of it and interlaced her fingers behind her back.
“Drake, why the hell did you take the vic’s cell phone? Drake, you’re… the way the others look at you…” she sighed, trying to collect herself. “I think you know how the others feel about you. This is too risky; you need to get the phone into evidence, pronto.”
Drake frowned and he shook his head.
“How they feel about me? I could care less how the others feel about me, or whether they stare at me until their eyes dry out and fall out of their faces, or if they want me gone. Besides, Rhodes basically told me he’s going to do everything in his power to get me fired, so who cares about all that noise? I certainly don’t. All I care about is getting this case solved before I go.”
Saying the actual words made the feelings Drake harbored more real, and it was a surprisingly cathartic experience.
The feeling was short-lived, however.
“So, let me get this straight,” Chase began, eyebrow raised. “Instead of doing everything by the book to make sure you don’t get fired, you go ahead and abandoned all the rules… you break the chain of custody so that evidence might not be admissible in court later on? You sure it isn’t you who wants to be fired?”
Her final comment struck a chord with him, and Drake mulled this over for several seconds, first considering what had happened that morning with Suzan, then the events of this afternoon with Sergeant Rhodes.
But then his mind flicked to Clay lying on his back, a bullet in his chest, coughing up blood.
The vest… why weren’t you wearing your vest, Clay? Shit, I was wearing mine…
Realizing that he was taking too long to answer, he shook his head briefly.
“Chain of custody isn’t broken, Chase—the phone just hasn’t been admitted yet,” he moved the cell phone even closer to her, but she took a step backward as if he was holding out a broken vial containing Ebola.
“Why’d you take it then?”
Drake smiled. Apparently, Chase didn’t know everything about being a detective in NYC yet.
“Maybe things are different in Seattle, but here, in NYC? Once this phone goes into evidence, good luck getting it back out again. First, you need to get a judge to issue a subpoena, and as you’ve already pointed out, I’m none too popular around here. Jump through that hoop, and then you need to somehow open the phone. Good fucking luck with that. Apple’s privacy laws are tighter than North Korea’s. You’re going to need to get a second subpoena to get them to unlock it. That could take months. A year, even. Then what? By then our guy is already worm food.”
Drake cringed at the last comment, wishing that he had chosen his words more carefully.
While Chase and the other uniforms in the Luther Street warehouse had been watching Beckett tease the Monarch caterpillar from the vic’s mouth, he had slipped a hand into the dead man’s suit coat and had put it in his own pocket. Despite his previous diatribe, he wished that even half of much forethought had gone into the act. The truth was, he just did it, hoping that his ingrained detective skills hadn’t led him astray.
He thought that Beckett might have seen him take the phone, but he was maybe the one man that Drake could still count on, as both a colleague and possibly a friend.
Chase’s frown suddenly transitioned into something different, an expression that he had seen before and already started to recognize despite their short time together.
She had made the same face moments before they had “started-over”; she was torn between two options, two frames of mind.
It was a place Drake had been many times during his career. Detective Adams was sandwiched between following the rules and solving a case.
“Promise me something,” she said at last.
“What?”
Chase reached out with surprising quickness and snatched the phone from his hand.
“That when your ship goes down in flames, you give me enough time to abandon ship. That seem fair?”
Drake smiled wryly.
“Ay, ay, Captain. Or do you prefer boss?”
Chase frowned, and turned her attention to the cell phone. She turned it over, running her fingers over the Apple emblem on the back.
“Tell me something… how’d you plan to unlock the phone once it’s charged?”
Now it was Drake’s turn to show his displeasure on his face.
“Unlock it? What do you mean, unlock it?”
Chase raised her eyes to look at him.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
She shook her head disapprovingly.
“You really are a dinosaur, aren’t you?” she pulled her own cell phone out of her pocket, and Drake recognized that it was nearly identical to the one he had taken from the vic.
Charger? Check.
She swiped the screen and showed it to him. He saw what appeared to be a grid of numbers.
“Everyone locks their phone these days,” she said simply. “You need a four-digit code to get in.”
Drake’s heart sunk.
“Well, how many combinations can there be?”
“Lemme see: ten numbers, zero to nine, four digits… oh, what is ten thousand, Alex.”
Drake’s eyes bulged.
“Ten thousand?”
Chase nodded.
“Ten thousand.”
Drake grunted.
“Really.”
“For real.”
“Then you get your wish: I’m going to drop it into evidence after all,” he said, reaching for the phone.
But Chase pulled it back and he looked up at her, confusion washing over him.
This woman was messing with his head.
And now she was smiling.
“What now?”
“There are ten thousand combinations and we’re never going to guess it. I don’t even think the phone will let you do something like 1-2-3-4 any more, or just
the same number four times.”
Drake frowned.
“Yeah, I get it; fine. Then why are you smiling?”
“Well, because you can either put in the code or… this is an iPhone 7.”
He shrugged.
“So?”
“So, you can also open it with a fingerprint.”
He suddenly realized what she was getting at, and was beginning to think that maybe she was going to be a helpful partner after all. Chase was no replacement for Clay, no one was, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a few tricks up her sleeve.
And now he was smiling. Drake opened his mouth to say something, when his own phone started to ring in his pocket, a loud, obnoxious bleep bleep bleep.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an ancient Nokia phone.
“Drake,” he said and then listened. Thirty seconds later, he added, “Yep, good. We’re on our way.”
Then he tucked the phone back into his pocket and smirked at the confused expression on Chase’s face.
Without saying anything, he started toward the door.
“Let’s go,” he said at last.
Chase blocked his path.
“You going to tell me who was on the phone, Zach Morris? Was it your pal AC Slater calling from nineteen-ninety-four?”
Drake had no idea who she was referring to, but answered anyway.
“That, Chase, was our man with the fingerprint; that was Beckett Campbell, and he wants us to visit him in the morgue. That okay by you, boss?”
CHAPTER 10
“Hypercytokinemia,” Beckett said as he pointed at the swollen red area on the vic’s neck.
“Hyper what?” Drake asked, staring stupidly at the ME. Usually Beckett spoke like a human, but in the past six months since they had seen each other, the man seemed to have reverted to the inane medical lingo that only a select few could even pretend to understand.
But then Drake realized that the doctor wasn’t even looking at him, but at her.
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