by Cole McCade
And the gun left on the guard’s hip, his body lying in a spreading pool of blood spilling from his split-open skull, while his pistol remained sheathed at his hip, even if the safety strap on the holster had been popped loose.
He’d started to unholster his gun, but never made it.
So why hadn’t the suspect taken his gun?
Taken anyone’s gun?
There had been several firearms left behind in the main scene in the warden’s office. Rifles. He could picture it in his mind’s eye as clearly as if the video was playing in front of him again in real-time: the other inmates assisting the suspect in holding the guards hostage, using their own weapons. The confusion as the suspect turned on them, firearms discarded by men who weren’t hardened prisoners in a maximum security facility, weren’t people with any capacity for violence at all; just mild-mannered men who had been shuffled off into comfortable cells to be forgotten, until a family member dropped by with a care package or to fulfill some obligatory duty.
They’d have dropped the weapons and tried to run, once the game of cops and robbers turned real.
Some had probably already been pondering running as they watched the man in the rabbit mask do his dirty work.
And he’d have used their fear and disorientation to make short work of them.
Then walked out, leaving the firearms behind instead of using them to his advantage.
Why?
Malcolm tapped his pen to his lower lip, frowning at an array of photographs of the solitary confinement cells, all emptied out for the forensics team.
It wasn’t preference for a specific weapon. If he refused to kill with anything other than a bladed edge, he’d have refused to assault several guards and inmates with a guard’s baton, using a blunt weapon versus a sharp object.
No.
Noise, he realized.
He had the advantage of soundproof walls in the warden’s office, but outside…
He could take someone down before they screamed and alerted someone.
A gunshot would sound the alarm instantly.
He’d thought every detail through.
Behind one of those simple, unremarkable faces was the kind of mind that would meticulously plot out every tiniest contingency. No impulses for this one, he thought. Not past that initial rash burst. He would take his time, make every decision after weighing and calculating every option.
And leave no trail of evidence, if he could help it.
Which meant anything they found was likely suspect.
Fuck.
He frowned, though, as he noticed something in the corner of one of the solitary cells, next to the cot. It looked like a dark smudge on the floor, a pile of black and white flakes and powder.
Ash…?
An evidence marker had been left next to the pile, marked C9-2.
He lifted his head. “What’s marked for C9-2? Do we have details on what was entered into evidence yet?”
The scratching of pens stopped; Seong-Jae looked up, rubbing at one eye, blinking as if just waking up, while Joshi’s constant whispered whistling stopped as he spiked his fingers through his hair, glancing around the room as if lost before standing up and leaning over to rummage in one of the cardboard file boxes Garza’s people had brought in. He flicked through pages and pages, then pulled out a sheet, squinting.
“Ash and burn residue,” he said. “Paper, from the composition. Some sort of thick paper, possibly cardstock or parcel paper, needs further analysis but not high priority. Small traces of melted plastic, yellow dye.”
“A bubble wrap envelope,” Seong-Jae said. “That is the most likely source.”
Malcolm’s fingers tightened on his notepad. “That was his cell. Someone sent the mask and any other tools he used to escape through prisoner mail, and he burned it to hide the identity of his accomplice. Then murdered every last one of the guards in solitary, so no one could trace anything back to him.”
“That is the most plausible explanation,” Seong-Jae agreed.
Joshi frowned. “They let that through? There must have been something contraband in the package or he wouldn’t have been able to use it to escape. The rabbit mask isn’t enough.”
“It’s possible it was brought in through unofficial channels,” Malcolm said. “Or someone paid off a mail room employee to let it in without checking it. We’ll have to find out who worked the mail room and if they remember the mask coming through, or if they can report any suspicious encounters regarding packages for a specific prisoner.”
“That’ll get us a possible ID,” Joshi said. “It’s a start.” He closed his eyes, then, wincing and rubbing his temples. “Though I need a break. Anyone else skip breakfast?”
“Yes,” Malcolm and Seong-Jae answered simultaneously, and Joshi smiled weakly.
“I’m guessing none of us are in the mood for rare steak.” With a dry chuckled, Joshi pulled his phone from his pocket, scrolling with his thumb. “If I order off GrubHub, everyone good with vegetarian?”
“Nothing with red sauce,” Seong-Jae cut in sharply. “Nothing with tomatoes at all.”
“Agreed,” Malcolm groaned.
Thumb scrolling, Joshi chuckled. “No meat, no red sauce, no tomatoes. That’s going to give us limited options, but I’ll see what I can find.”
Seong-Jae pushed to his feet abruptly, chair scraping back. “I need air—and proper milk if I am to drink any more of this black swill. There is a convenience store down the street, is there not?”
“I think I saw one on the way in, yeah,” Malcolm said. He didn’t like this—the feeling of displacement working in a city that wasn’t his, not having those familiar touchpoints to ground him when the case itself was already tipping him off his feet. He tilted his head back against his chair, looking up at Seong-Jae. “Want some company? I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs.”
“I will not be away long enough to be worth it.” Seong-Jae braced his hands against the back of Malcolm’s chair and leaned down over him, briefly pressing his lips to his brow, a touch of warmth before he drew away. “Do you need anything?”
“I’ll just wait until we order.” Malcolm smiled faintly, reaching after Seong-Jae to catch and lace their fingers briefly, before letting go. “Don’t forget your coat.”
Seong-Jae just gave him a flat look, and Malcolm’s smile strengthened.
So he was fussing a little.
He needed small things like that to ground him.
Seong-Jae pulled away, retrieved his jacket from the back of his chair, and shrugged into it as he stepped from the room. Joshi’s gaze trailed significantly after him—before crossing with Malcolm’s as the door closed behind Seong-Jae’s long, rangy stride.
Malcolm arched a brow, while Joshi stared unreadably directly at him.
Well.
This was awkward.
And Malcolm just lowered his gaze to his notepad again, making a note of the evidence number for the pile of ash.
“Do the two of you usually PDA on the job?” Joshi asked pointedly.
…goddammit.
Malcolm closed his eyes, breathed in slow through his nostrils, counted to ten. “We’re not having this conversation. If you think our conduct is unprofessional, Seong-Jae and I can discuss it when he gets back.”
“Do what you like,” Joshi said mildly. “It was just a curious question.”
“Look.” Malcolm dropped his notepad and stack of photos and files on the table, spinning his chair to face Joshi and bracing his hands against his knees, meeting his eyes. “I don’t know what your game is, but do you know what you did to him, dragging him back into this life?” he asked—and he didn’t even bother keeping the edge out of his voice. Seong-Jae wasn’t here, and Malcolm didn’t feel the need to play neutral right now when for fuck’s sake, they had a job to do and nearly three dozen people dead and seven potential suspects, and he didn’t need Joshi being a catty fucking asshole in the middle of all that. “Do you feel no shame for that at all?”
Joshi’s eyes went flat, glassy as smooth-polished granite. “You don’t get to ask me what I feel. Especially not about him.”
“I can ask you to do your job,” Malcolm said firmly. “Treat Seong-Jae like one of your agents. Not your ex. And one of your agents needs you to understand that if you need him in top form, you can’t put added stressors on him with unnecessary tension.” He arched a brow. “Understood?”
He was beginning to get a read on Joshi’s long, measuring pauses.
They were a way of keeping control of the situation, of maintaining a sense of elevated detachment from it, forcing the other person to wait for his response until he chose to give it.
And he finally gave it with a smile, slow and thoughtful and almost pleased. “Maybe you aren’t so soft after all,” he said. “Interesting.”
Anything Malcolm might have said was cut off by a sharp rap on the door, an imperious and demanding snap of knuckles, before Garza shoved the door open firmly enough to make the blinds over the window inset rattle. She leaned in, her ferocious gaze whipping over them, before she beckoned in a quick flick of her fingers.
“C’mon,” she said. “Get a move on.”
Malcolm was already on his feet, reaching for his suit coat. “What’s going on?”
“We got one of ‘em,” she said, an almost carnivorous edge to her voice. “And we just brought him in.”
C
MALCOLM HAD HIS PHONE IN his hand and was texting Seong-Jae before he was even out the door.
Got one, he said. Come back. Milk later.
Milk now, returned after a moment, phone buzzing in his hand. I am just walking in the front door. What floor?
Malcolm swore.
Fuck.
He really hated not being in his own station.
“Garza,” he said to her tight, tense back, the tail of her hair swaying down her spine in whiplash snaps as he followed her out into the hall. “What floor is holding?”
“Second,” she called back.
Second floor, he tapped. Meet you there.
Before he forced himself into the elevator with Joshi and Garza, and ignored that pervasive feeling that the floor was going to drop out from beneath him on an open elevator shaft and dump him down several floors into the dark.
He really needed to get over his thing with elevators.
By the time they stepped off on the second floor, Seong-Jae was stepping out of the stairwell, a plastic bag dangling from his hand, rustling and clinging damply to the sides of a paper milk carton. Garza paused mid-stride, giving him an odd look; Seong-Jae scowled at her as he fell into line with Malcolm, that fierce expression practically daring her to say anything, that scar like a nonverbal warning. She just rolled her eyes, flicked her fingers, and led them past the main bank of holding cells full of tired-looking people who seemed as gray and sagging as their clothing.
Malcolm might have smiled, if he didn’t feel like his chest was lanced through with tension, tight and ready.
It couldn’t be this easy.
Even if the suspect was off his game after years in jail…
It couldn’t be.
A wall of interrogation rooms waited just beyond the next doorway, almost identical to the bank of side-by-side rooms at the BPD, with their massive one-way glass observation windows and sterile interiors with only a bolted-on table, two chairs, recording device, camera mounted in the corner.
And in the second room, Dale Walters.
The check forger.
He was a lean man, approximately five foot eight or so, with an unruly thatch of washed-out blond hair, thinning at the crown enough to show pink scalp. He sat with a certain hunch, as if he was accustomed to making himself small to avoid drawing notice; he still wore prison oranges, a short-sleeved jumpsuit with a long-sleeved white shirt underneath, and he kept his head down and his arms clasped together, turned so that his inner elbows were exposed and facing upward, his hands sandwiched between his skinny thighs.
Malcolm leaned his elbows against the edge of the observation window, watching him. The way he kept turning his head subtly from side to side without lifting it, but didn’t actually move his eyes—which were a sort of flat and muddy brown, if Malcolm remembered from the mug shots, even if it was impossible to fully see at this angle and the way he kept his head bowed.
…ah.
His hands.
His hands were scraped, the knuckles bloody and raw.
And he was trying to avoid looking at them.
“He’s not our guy,” he murmured, then glanced over his shoulder at Garza. “How did we get him?”
“Tried to pickpocket,” she said. “Came into the city instead of heading for the outskirts like anybody with goddamned good sense, tried to jump a guy in a back alley and steal his wallet and clothing. Probably was going to buy himself a hot meal and try to disappear, but the guy threw him against a wall, took off, called the cops.” She rested her hands on her hips, knuckles curled. “When the sirens chased him down, he didn’t even try to run. He just…gave up.”
“Could be a ploy,” Joshi pointed out. “Throw us off the scent.”
“No,” Seong-Jae said, staring fixedly into the interrogation room, a strange expression on his angled, graceful face, remote, almost…Malcolm wasn’t sure he’d call it disappointed, but there was a quiet, tense darkness there, something riding him heavy. “I believe Malcolm. He is not the one.”
“Waiting for a reason,” Garza said.
“The most obvious one,” Malcolm said, “is there’s no point in throwing us off with this kind of ploy when he’s still a convicted offender and he’s going right back to jail. We’re not going to say ‘our mistake’ and let him go.” He pushed himself up, bracing his hands against the molded plastic of the window frame, tapping his fingertips as if his restless movements could organize his restless thoughts. “But the real reason is that he won’t look at the blood on his hands.”
“Just so,” Seong-Jae said. “Just so. Perhaps he is compulsive, but I do believe the uncleanliness of his own hands is upsetting him at the moment, and he is attempting very fiercely not to see it. A likely case of OCD germophobia. True OCD, rather than adopting the mimicking traits our suspect would.”
“And,” Malcolm added, “our suspect isn’t afraid of blood.”
“There’s still a chance of compartmentalizing and splitting,” Joshi pointed out. “An alternate persona. I am Jack’s murderous urges, but by day he’s disgusted by the things that fascinate him when he’s on a tear.”
“Less Bukowski, more modern psychology,” Malcolm murmured, turning that over, leaning in harder, until he could almost see his own reflection in the glass, a dim ghostly shadow overlaid on Walters. “You don’t hide that kind of personality splitting for over fifteen years in a facility where you’re at least lightly supervised. There’d be a medical report, psych evaluation, something.”
“Faking it?” Garza offered.
“Possible, but not likely.” Malcolm rocked back on his heels, letting his hands fall. “Let’s get him a wet towel, Neosporin, and some gauze, and talk to him. I just don’t think it’s him…but let’s do the work and see what he can tell us about what happened.”
Joshi made a face, sighing. “That’s one down, at least. And then there were six.”
Seong-Jae tore his gaze away from Walters, looking down at Joshi, eyes flat and unreadable. “That makes this a game of Russian Roulette.”
“Yeah.” Malcolm buried his fingers in his hair, then dragged them down over his face. This day…just got a hell of a lot longer. “But we’re not the ones with our fingers on the trigger.”
[11: NOTHING PERSONAL]
MIN ZHE SAT OUTSIDE THE loading dock of Santiago Vasquez’s shop, propped atop a stack of crates tall enough that he could leave his feet swinging and simply enjoy the quiet of the white-blanketed morning, breathing in the crisp, metallic scent of the fresh snow that had fallen overnight and letting the icy air clear his head a
nd ache in his lungs.
He liked mornings like this. When the entire sky turned pink, before the blues and purples and golds crept in. There was a certain magic to the way the pale magenta, liquid-bright sky painted the clouds, so that instead of reflecting light they seemed to have pulled that radiance from inside themselves, strange bioluminescent organisms in a rose-colored sea of brilliance.
He'd met Sade for the second time under a sky like this.
A Sade very different from the youngling he’d known before, before life and time and work had taken Min Zhe away from the place they’d once both called home and thrust him into a world where he would never feel safe with anyone again.
He still remembered realizing the lean, agile adult with that strong-boned, fierce face and whipping mane of hair wasn’t that child he remembered, back when he, too, had barely been more than a child himself.
Wasn’t a child at all.
Wasn’t many things, but one thing Sade was…
Was the last piece of his former self who hadn’t died.
And Min Zhe still remembered that day, when those tawny eyes had fixed on him with anger, determination, fear, fury, disappointment, hope.
When Sade said they had come to save him.
Save him, and pull him out from this misery that had been created first on his behalf…and then by his own hand.
Standing under a pink sky with the morning turning their dusky skin all shades of roses and earth, with the rising sun in their eyes and everything beautiful Min Zhe had forgotten caught up in the stubborn set of their mouth….for a moment, they really had looked like salvation.
Heh.
Save him.
When all he’d done was drag Sade out from beneath that rising light, and into a dark with no stars and without end.
The squeak of hinges from inside the loading area warned him he wasn’t alone. He waited still, watching the sky, while that squeak came again, followed by the bang of a door. Footsteps.
And then company, settling to lean against the stack of crates and look up at the sky with him, Santiago Vasquez comfortable and unassuming in his thick flannel jacket, jeans, square-toed boots. Vasquez was quiet for some time—a lean man who didn’t stand out, golden skin and neatly-cropped black hair and dark eyes that had a certain knowledge to them, a certain kindness, and a certain blankness that promised deeper things hiding under the surface.
