by J. E. Taylor
“They still do.”
Steve raised his eyebrows.
“Study the case,” he said before Steve could ask the question.
“Holy shit.” A whole brain dump of information came barreling from the recesses of his mind. “You’re lucky she’s alive.”
Eric dipped his head in a slight nod. “It was really hard when my mom came back. Everyone said she died in that car crash, but I knew better. I knew, but who was gonna believe an eight year old, especially when the dental records came back saying it was my mom.” He surveyed the landscape before he continued. “My dad had already remarried so her homecoming was pretty entertaining.” He let that hang in the air for a few minutes.
“How’d your mom deal with that?” Especially after the physical and psychological torture she endured during captivity.
He shrugged, turning toward Steve. “I’m not sure she could have gone back with my dad after everything, anyway. I guess being locked in a room with Tom Whitman for two months kinda changed her point of view.” He offered a hint of a smile. “They ended up hooking up until Chris entered the picture.”
“Ah.” Steve commented, remembering the headlines. Tom Whitman’s wife was the one who went ballistic on Eric’s family. “So your mom’s been married three times?” That ordeal must have fucked her up pretty bad.
“It had nothing to do with the ordeal,” Eric answered Steve’s train of thought instead of the question. “She never should have married Tom.”
“You didn’t like him?”
Eric let a laugh escape. “Tom was very cool as a stepfather. Hollywood, stardom, it was fun but he wasn’t around very much. My mom didn’t want anything to do with the limelight after the media blitz she endured when she came back from the dead, so Tom bounced between coasts for five years. When he got the lead in that movie, things started to go south.”
Steve let out a whistle. “That must have been hard on her.”
“It was, but in a way, it made it easier when Chris came along.”
“She obviously doesn’t get till death do us part.”
Eric stood, glaring down at his partner. “Shut up.” He turned and went into the dorm.
Steve stayed on the front steps, mulling over the conversation. His mind shuffled through the new set of facts bombarding his brain, sifting, analyzing. His attention wandered back to the first day in the dorm when he found out Eric could read minds. “Family,” he mumbled and stood up, retreating to their room.
Chapter 14
Steve sat at his computer, sifting through the FBI case file on Kyle Wisnowski when he came to the pictures of his living room; he paused and closed his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Eric stepped into the room. Steve had blown off morning classes.
Steve raised his eyes, meeting Eric’s gaze. He didn’t have to speak.
“Jack’s going to kill you.” Eric had been given access to the case file on Kyle with the instruction not to give Steve the password.
Steve shrugged and took a deep breath, glancing back at the monitor. “Did you ever see the case file?”
“Yes, I’ve read the file,” he said. “How the hell did you get access? The file’s password protected.”
“I know Jack well enough to figure out his passwords.” He glanced up at Eric. “Besides, this is my research, my life.” He sighed looking at the crime scene photographs. “This is what he did to my family.” Steve spun the monitor around so Eric could see the carnage. “The blood you see covering everything. That was my daughter.”
Eric lost all color in his face as he took in the scene. There in vivid color was Steve lying with Jennifer in his lap. Bone jutting from his right arm and his foot twisted almost backwards, but the worst of it was the shard of bone sticking from his eye. Bloody vapor covered everything. “Jesus.” Eric stumbled backwards.
“I thought you saw the case file.”
“I read the file. I wasn’t given access to the crime scene photos.”
Steve chuckled at the pale shock in Eric’s expression. “I thought you had seen so much in your life.”
Eric snapped his mouth closed and his eyes hardened. “Fuck you.”
“Look, are you going to help me catch this bastard or not?”
“What are you going to do if you catch him?”
Steve swiveled the monitor back in his direction studying the picture on the screen. “I’m going to kill him... slowly.” He glanced up.
Eric shook his head. “I’m not going to help you.”
Steve couldn’t blame him. If the tables were turned, he wouldn’t stand by and let his partner kill someone either. Justice was no longer an option in his mind—it had been replaced by a visceral craving for vengeance. “Then I suggest you stay out of my way.”
“No can do. Jack specifically told me to keep you away from that case.”
Steve cocked his head and folded his arms, leaning back in the seat. “And how exactly did Jack suggest you do that?”
Eric shrugged. “Jack didn’t tell me how to do it, just that I had to.”
Steve laughed. “Kid, you have no idea what kind of trouble you’re paired up with, do you?”
“You really think you can throw all your training away and kill someone in cold blood?”
Steve inhaled through his nose and glanced at the screen, the blow of seeing the picture in Technicolor pierced the center of his being like a shotgun blast. He raised his gaze to Eric’s and nodded, his vision fogging with tears. “He took everything from me.” Steve blinked the haze away and sniffed, resolved in his mission.
“That doesn’t make it right.”
Steve closed his eyes and let out a slight burst of laughter. “That’s something Jenny would say.”
“Sounds like a very wise woman.”
“She was,” Steve said, his eyes opening to the battered form on the screen.
“Maybe you should rethink your plan.”
Steve’s eyebrows rose. “What’s to rethink? He’s an animal and I’m gonna hunt him down.”
“I agree he needs to be stopped, but wouldn’t putting him behind bars be more of a punishment than killing him?”
Steve mulled it over. “With this guy’s connections, he’d make a deal and probably walk because of it.”
It was Eric’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “Bondino?”
Steve nodded. “Yeah, he’s a bigger fish and the bureau wants to take him down. I couldn’t get the goods on him when I was undercover in Charlie’s organization. Nothing more than hearsay anyhow.” Steve reflected on the night Charlie killed Desiree. That was the only time he ever indicated a connection to Tony Bondino. He hadn’t been able to find the tape with that conversation in Charlie’s repertoire and unfortunately, without that, or the money trail, it wasn’t solid enough to go after the Bondinos.
Steve logged out and leaned back in the chair. “What’d I miss?”
Eric tossed the mini-recorder to Steve. “I taped it for you.”
Suspicion crawled under his skin. Eric never did anything for him and he studied the recording device and then glanced at Eric. “What are you buttering me up for?”
“My girlfriend is coming up this weekend.”
Steve pursed his lip and rocked in the chair, not showing a hint of the amusement playing in his mind, even though he was sure Eric got a whiff of it, especially with the sour pout playing on his partner’s lips.
He knew what it was like here, how rare it was to have a moment alone with a girl, but he didn’t want to make this easy for Eric. “And?”
“Do I even have to say it?”
Suppressing a smile, Steve raised an eyebrow.
“Fine. I was wondering if you could be scarce Saturday night.”
Steve leaned forward in his chair, narrowing his eyes. “You have to ask me nicely,” he said with a passable impression of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“That doesn’t qualify as nice.” He made
parenthesis with his fingers when he said the word nice.
“Are you going to be scarce or not?” Eric wasn’t taking the bait and his face grew red with aggravation.
Steve chuckled. “You really suck the fun out of razzing you, sometimes.”
It was Eric’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I’ll find something to do Saturday night,” he said. “And thanks for taping the class.”
Chapter 15
Saturday rolled around and Steve found solace in the library while Eric entertained his girl for the night. It was the first time Eric left him alone for more than an hour’s time and with no new information on Kyle and no change in Jennifer’s condition, Steve focused on his new partner, pilfering through the archives, digging up everything he could on Eric Connor and his family.
He accessed the New York City police department database pulling up the video of Eric’s family under siege at the warehouse incident five years before. After repeated viewings, he concluded that the only ones who should be alive today were Eric and one of his younger brothers.
Besides his sister’s death, his younger brother should have bled to death when the crazy bitch raked the knife across his throat, but nothing happened to him, nothing, no mark, no blood, nothing.
Eric was another story—at that very same moment, his right hand split open to the bone, as if he somehow put his hand between the knife and his brother’s throat, saving the kid’s life.
The gunshot wounds Eric’s mother sustained should have killed her but according to the medical reports; she only had one shallow lesion in her shoulder. He re-read that part, switching between the video and the medical notes again, and again, and again.
“No fucking way.” He sat back in the seat, wiping his mouth with his hand.
Eric’s stepfather, his stepfather was something different entirely. With so much that didn’t add up, Steve wondered how they could close the case so quickly. But then again, having more money than God must have helped. Filthy rich didn’t begin to describe it. Eric’s stepfather was one of the wealthiest men in the world.
The shitty quality of the tape didn’t diminish the horror of Chris Ryan’s beating and the crucifixion that followed. The blood loss alone, three quarts according to the forensic notes, would have killed a normal man. Yet he somehow lived, and had the strength to kill the bitch with his own hands.
“Shit.” Steve muttered, biting his lower lip and concentrating on a frame-by-frame analysis. Some of the frames were warped static and he couldn’t make out a thing, but the clear ones made him shiver.
Frame by frame, Chris Ryan fell from the cross and just before he disappeared from view, Steve swore he saw the man split in two. He rewound to see it again, printing the frame.
He rubbed his eyes and watched a third time. “Was that a fucking ghost?” Steve leaned back, his jaw slack and he watched yet again. That meant Eric’s stepfather actually died in that warehouse. “Ho-ly shit.”
A dozen frames later, Eric’s stepfather stepped back into view. Steve froze the frame and stared at the man’s back. Bloody, but smooth—not a trace of the raw shredded welts it had been when she finished the flogging.
“Jesus Christ almighty!” He rubbed his sweaty palms on the soft fabric of his jeans, swallowing the rock that formed in his throat. After a deep calming breath, he rewound to the full frame of the ghost.
His heart lurched in his chest.
The ghost wasn’t Eric’s stepfather.
This face was familiar for very different reasons and Steve’s blood shifted, braised by an arctic wind that attacked his veins, chilling him to the core.
“Ho-ly shit.” He pushed his chair, shot to his feet, and paced back and forth, staring at the monitor like it was a cobra ready to strike. “No fucking way.”
He took a seat again, pushing the heel of his palm to his good eye, sucking air in to calm his racing pulse. He slammed his index finger on the print button, lifting the color photograph off the printer, studying it. A shiver bit his neck and he shuddered, dropping the photo in his backpack with the others.
He played the rest of the video in slow motion. Slowing to frame by frame as the woman blinded Eric’s stepfather with Chemical Mace. Chemical burns scarred the skin around his eyes in one frame, but in the next, it was gone.
Steve shook his head, rubbed his eyes and played the scene again. The same results, impossible becoming possible and Steve exhaled, suddenly aware he had been holding his breath.
Eric’s stepfather insisted he killed the woman out of self-defense, and from what Steve saw—it looked valid even with the rest of the inconsistencies on the tape. He burnt the video to disk and slid it into his backpack.
Steve picked up the print of the ghost. The case analysis they had done on this one still gave him the creeps. Kidnapping, rape, murder, all for what? Underground porn and snuff videos?
He plugged in a name and the picture that came back was identical to the picture of the ghost in his hand. He tossed the picture in his backpack and brought up the archive of the still open case. The file included ten years worth of videos, violent and bloody mixed with steamy and hot. Steve pulled up the last one. The one aired on national television after the story broke. He burned it to a disc and went through the gruesome scene frame by frame.
Steve stopped the video when an image in the mirror gave him pause. It was a little boy holding his mother’s hand. Not the image of the room. He rewound a few frames and played the tape again.
It wasn’t his imagination.
A little boy was holding the woman’s hand in a long hallway, not the horrifying reflection of Ty Aris stretched by chains, like the frame before and after the anomaly.
Steve pushed the chair back. He wiped his face with his hands and glanced up.
* * * *
Eric stood at the head of the stairs looking down at Steve, his heart hammering in his throat. He had been there long enough to know Steve had figured out his family secret.
Steve didn’t move. He just sat in the chair looking up at Eric, his hands frozen half way down his face. His eye glanced back at the frame in front of him and back up to Eric as a new thought dawned on him. That’s you, isn’t it?
“Yes.”
Steve winced at the volume of the voice invading his mind.
Leave it alone. Eric’s voice boomed again.
“Stop doing that,” Steve said aloud.
Eric smiled at Steve’s discomfort. Not until you forget everything you just spent the last twelve hours sorting through.
“Bullshit!” Steve raised his voice. It echoed through the nearly empty library.
Eric trotted down the stairs and approached the table. He took a seat opposite Steve, his swirling eyes hard and intense.
Steve blinked and looked at the screen, the images converging together in his mind like a storm. His mind grappled with the unimaginable, processing the information he gained from all the reports—the inconsistencies, the miracles.
“Jesus!” The exclamation accompanied a sudden epiphany, and he knew what Eric was hiding. He shook his head, glancing between the screen, his backpack and Eric. His eyes narrowed as everything slammed into place. “Why are you here?”
“To uphold the law.”
Steve laughed. “You’ve been aiding and abetting a fugitive for what, fifteen years?”
“You have no idea what you are talking about.” Eric sat back.
Steve leaned forward. “Your stepfather is Ty Aris,” he whispered.
“His name is Chris Ryan.” Eric said. “Ty was his brother.”
“Then why did Ty’s ghost split off from your stepfather in that warehouse?”
It was Eric’s turn to blink. He couldn’t cover the surprise fast enough. “You’ve got no proof.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Steve pulled the copy paper out of the bag and handed it to Eric.
The picture was a blur. Eric looked at it and handed it back to Steve, the crease between his eyes deepen
ing. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Steve looked at the photograph and his mouth dropped, he clamped it shut and looked at the screen. Only the reflection of the room was visible in the mirror. He glanced at Eric, filled with both fury and self-doubt. “I know what I saw.”
“I’m sure you do,” Eric allowed. “But understand this, if you come after my family, you will never get the chance to get the bastard who destroyed yours.” He stood and left the library, leaving Steve gaping at him.
Steve looked back at the computer and the image was there, blazed in the screen, and burned in his memory.
Chapter 16
Twelve hours. It took Steve twelve hours. Jesus, he’s good. Eric sat at the computer, doing some reconnaissance of his own but there was nothing in the files or news reports to use against his roommate. “You’re a fucking boy scout,” Eric said looking up at Steve as he stormed into the dorm room.
“And you’re a fucking felon.” Steve slammed the door.
“I was eight,” Eric admitted. “I didn’t know any better. The guy had just saved my mother, so to me he was a saint.”
It took a second, a couple of rapid blinks while he processed the words and then Steve tilted his head. “But?”
“No, I wasn’t there, not physically anyway. But I saw most of what happened and I was the one who fixed him.”
Steve scrunched his eyebrows, confused. What the hell was this kid babbling about? “Fixed him?”
Eric nodded. “Healed him.”
Steve stepped back; the full force of those two words sucked the air out of his chest. Flashes of the videos he just spent the night watching snapped like a slide show in his mind. From the bowels of his soul came a swell of possibility with Jennifer’s name on it. His mouth opened to speak, then closed it as he formulated the question. “What do you mean ‘healed him’?”
“He would have bled to death on the floor,” Eric said. “He saved my mom. I couldn’t let him die.” He stood and walked to the window.
