I drew my weapon and tried the front door. It was locked so I kicked it in.
“Police!” I yelled as I entered the home.
I went from room to room, clearing the house quickly and systematically, the way I’d been trained.
Brandt wasn’t home.
Everything was neatly arranged, the beds made, the magazines stacked, fresh bars of soap by the sinks, and yet there was a worn-out dinginess to the place that was unmistakable. A subtle, baked in funk hung in the air. It wasn’t a bad smell, not like a dead body or anything like that, just a lived-in and hadn’t-been-cleaned-in-a-long-while funk. Brandt was keeping up appearances, but I could tell he wasn’t far from falling down. I could tell because his house looked a lot like mine.
Once I cleared the house, I holstered my weapon and started looking around, trying to get a bead on what kind of man Brandt was. There were pictures on the wall that looked like they’d been there since he was in high school. I saw a few large framed photos of a nondescript, middle-aged couple, a few of Brandt as a younger man, but nothing recent. Brandt had probably been raised in this home, I figured, and probably inherited it from his parents. But he’d done nothing to make it his own. The little porcelain figurines in the curio cabinets looked like the treasures of a housewife. So too did the Bible verses framed on the walls and the quilted blanket on the edge of the couch. I got the feeling the house hadn’t changed much since the late ’90s.
I was walking through the master bedroom when I realized something was wrong. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but I had a feeling I was missing something important. I remember once, back in my street cop days, I pulled over this beat-to-hell pickup for rolling through a stop sign. I got up to the driver’s side window and saw this skuzzy-looking white guy in his early forties behind the wheel, trash all over the floorboards, the ash tray overflowing with crushed cigarettes, and a cute-looking Hispanic girl just a hair passed eighteen sitting in the passenger seat beside him. The girl was nicely dressed in a tartan skirt and white blouse, expensive-looking jewelry around her neck and on her fingers, well-cared for by somebody. And she looked so scared. I swear to God I saw her shaking. The picture didn’t add up.
I got the guy’s driver’s license, ran it, and he came back as a registered sex offender, out on parole for aggravated sexual assault of a minor. The girl was eighteen, but she didn’t look it.
My first thought was Oh crap, that girl’s about to get raped and left for dead in a ditch someplace.
I went up to the truck and told the guy to get out.
He said, “What for?”
I said, “Because I fuckin’ told you to. Now get your butt out of the truck before I yank you out by your teeth.”
I searched him, cuffed him, and stuffed him into the backseat of my patrol car. After that, I went up to the girl. I got her out and we stepped around to the front of the truck. I positioned her so the cab of the truck was blocking the guy’s line of sight, and I asked her the guy’s name. She didn’t know it. I asked her how she knew him. She didn’t answer. I asked her if she was okay. Is this guy taking you somewhere you don’t want to go?
“If he’s up to something, tell me. I will help you. I won’t let him hurt you.”
The girl didn’t answer me. She was looking at the shine on the toes of my boots, at the dirt on the ground, everywhere but at my eyes.
“If you need help,” I told her, “this is your chance. Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll help you. I can have another officer come by here. He can take you home, or to a friend’s house. Anywhere you want to go.”
When the girl answered, her voice was so quiet I had to lean in to hear.
“I just want to leave,” she said. “Please don’t bother us.”
I said something else, but she turned away and climbed back into the truck. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood there, staring at her profile through the passenger window, the girl wringing her hands in her lap, her black, shampoo commercial hair falling around her face.
But I had no choice in the matter. There was nothing I could use to justify arresting this guy beyond the voice inside my head that kept yelling she was a lamb headed for the slaughter. But she was eighteen, free to do as she liked, and I had no probable cause to make an arrest for anything. No leg to stand on.
To this day I think about that traffic stop and I have a sick feeling in my gut that I missed something important that day. I didn’t do something that I might have done. I just know it.
And I had that same feeling standing in the bathroom of Brandt’s master bedroom. Something was wrong, and I wasn’t seeing what it was.
“Think,” I told myself. “What are you missing?”
I couldn’t figure it out until I got to the kitchen. The counters had been wiped clean and there were no dishes in the sink, a fresh garbage bag in the empty trash can. The whole place had the feel of finality about it, like it had been packed up and organized in preparation for something.
And then I saw the paperwork on his kitchen table. He’d laid out his driver’s license, Social Security card, homeowner’s insurance, his last two tax returns, and bank account statements in an orderly, fanned out pile. It reminded me of the way Officer Robinson had organized the contents of my wallet on the hood of his car. The whole thing was meticulously arranged.
Next to the paperwork was a plastic grocery bag full of prescription pill bottles. I took a few of them out. They were for high blood pressure and depression, plus a few pain pills. Nothing major though. No hepatitis or cancer drugs, nothing like that.
It’s a myth that all suicides leave a note. Some do, but definitely not all of them. Quite a few, in fact, leave absolutely no clue as to why they’ve decided to end their lives.
But I’d seen this before. This was Brandt’s version of a suicide note, laying out the details of his life and making it easier for whoever would come along to do the paperwork on his death.
I picked up his driver’s license and studied his picture. He was thirty-four, skinny, almost no chin and a caterpillar-looking thing that was supposed to be a moustache on his upper lip. He had short, blond hair and his eyes were wide, making it look like he was frightened of something.
Thomas Brandt was going to kill himself, I thought.
The realization didn’t rouse any pity in me though. More like irritation. How was I supposed to find this guy before he carried it out? Most suicides, and I mean the ones who actually intend to do it and aren’t just making a lot of drama to get attention, find someplace where they can take their last breath without interruption. He lived alone. I would have thought he’d go into a back bedroom and hang himself or something. Maybe take a crap load of the painkillers he’d so carefully stocked in the bag and wash them down with a gallon of booze. Go out easy.
I frowned down at the pile, wondering what thread to pick up next. I tossed Brandt’s license down on the stack and was about to go looking through the house for more clues when my eye caught a sales receipt next to his tax returns.
It was for the Bellum Salvage Company. Back when I first promoted into Homicide, I was put on the Gun Detail. My job was to go through the Property Room Gun Files once a month to see what guns needed to be pulled out of evidence and destroyed, which usually meant weapons used in a crime where the incident had been adjudicated. Obviously, we weren’t going to give a weapon back to a convicted felon, and the Department didn’t want to burden itself with becoming a gun dealer, so once a month I’d go to the Property Room and load up the bed of a pickup with guns and drive them over to the Bellum Salvage Company. From there we put the guns into the backseat of a junked car that was then fed into a compactor that smashed and formed the vehicle into something about the size and shape of a bale of hay.
But Bellum generally only worked with commercial clients.
What was Brandt doing with one of their receipts?
I fished it out of the pile, and what I saw there made the bile rise in my throat. Thomas Brandt had paid $80
0 to have a wrecked Ford pickup, red in color, crushed and disposed of almost exactly a year ago. My face grew hot. My breaths whistled in my nostrils. I balled my hands into fists so tightly they’d gone numb.
Witnesses to the crash that killed my wife and children managed to get a fairly decent vehicle description. A red Ford pickup, later model, with one of those cartoons of Calvin pissing on a Chevy emblem on the back windshield and a partial Texas plate that started with either BR or BK. The witnesses couldn’t agree on the plate, and nobody got the full number.
Thomas Brandt had paid to have a red Ford pickup destroyed just two days after the crash that killed my family, and the license plate recorded on the sales slip was BR6D31.
I remembered what Officer Robinson had said about Limbus having a knack for picking the right person to do the job at hand, and the realization that the man I was hunting was the same man who had killed my family was like a red cloud settling over my mind, blocking out everything but hate and rage.
“You fucking bastard,” I said. “You goddamn lowlife little fuck.”
I let the receipt fall to the table.
“You killed my family.”
I beat my fists on the table. I wanted to put my hands on Thomas Brandt’s neck and strangle the life out of the little bastard.
I wanted him dead. By my bare hands.
In the silence of that house, my rage seething inside me, my police radio suddenly seemed very loud.
“Seventy-two Fifty and Seventy-two Sixty, and I need you guys to make Grissom and Spencer for an MV-Ped. I’ve got EMS already on scene and a possible ten-sixty.”
An MV-Ped was a motor vehicle-pedestrian accident. A ten-sixty a dead on arrival. The kind of calls patrolman dread getting.
But then I thought of the location she’d put out. Grissom and Spencer. Grissom was the road that ran along the southern edge of Brandt’s neighborhood, and Spencer the cross street where Brandt had crashed into and killed Officer Robinson. The bastard was going back to the scene of the first fatality crash he’d been in to commit suicide. I could just picture it, that bitter little drunk walking into traffic. He probably even thought he was offering his death up as some sort of penance, like maybe that crazed act would somehow wash away all his sins.
I shook my head, the rage pulsing through me harder than ever.
That was not going to happen.
Thomas Brandt was not going to die thinking he’d made it all better, because he hadn’t.
He could never make it all better.
*
I got in my car and I drove to Grissom and Spencer as fast as my little Honda would carry me.
The intersection was a circus of red and blue lights. Cars were parked along the road and people were standing next to their vehicles, watching what was going on. Firefighters and paramedics were standing around a white Honda minivan that had crashed into a row of cars. The woman who had been driving it was holding a crying baby in her arms as she sat on the curb, rocking back and forth in shock.
“He came out of nowhere,” she kept saying. “I couldn’t stop.”
The EMS guys were loading a gurney into the back of their wagon. I ran over to them and caught a glimpse of Thomas Brandt’s bloody face as he disappeared into the ambulance.
“Whoa!” one of the paramedics said, putting his palm up to my chest. “Hold up there, buddy.”
“It’s alright,” I said. “I’m SAPD. Is that Thomas Brandt you got there?”
“No clue. We didn’t find any ID.”
“That’s him,” I said. “We’ve been looking for him.”
“Was he running? That woman over there said he just walked right into the middle of traffic.”
“We weren’t chasing him,” I said. “Where are you taking him?”
“University, it looks like.”
“Is this life-threatening?”
The EMT glanced back at Brandt. “Nah, he’s gonna be fine. Just some cuts and bruises, maybe a broken wrist.”
“Okay,” I said, struggling desperately to keep myself from jumping into the ambulance and finishing what the minivan had started. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll probably see you guys at the hospital.”
The EMT shrugged and closed the door.
But as I made my way back to my car, I knew Thomas Brandt was not going to be all right. He had a reckoning ahead of him, and I was going to see to it that he faced it.
*
The ambulance ran lights and sirens down to University Hospital, but it wasn’t hard to follow them. Firefighters and cops have different takes on what it means to run code. Firefighters stick to the ten miles an hour over the speed limit rule. Cops, not so much. Staying with them wasn’t hard.
But once we got to the hospital I had to hang back.
I had a gun and badge on my hip, so nobody bothered to stop me. Cops are pretty common in emergency rooms. But I couldn’t get in the way. I had to watch, my rage barely contained, as the nurses check him over and tended to his hurts.
But finally they left him alone.
The nurse stepped out and pulled the curtain closed behind him. The trauma room was crowded, with nurses and doctors running every which way, but nobody was paying me any mind. Hospitals are designed to deal with crises, matters of life and death hanging in the balance, and so minor injuries get a quick fix and little more. Some bandages, some pain killers, and out the door—and out of mind—you go. As a plain-clothes detective, I was just part of the woodwork. They walked right by me. Nobody even bothered to give me a double take as I slipped through the opaque plastic curtains to talk with a man with minor injuries.
He was bare chested, wearing only jeans and boots, a few bandages on his right arm. His shirt was in a pile on the chair next to his bed. His face was red and puffy, like he’d been crying, and his blond hair was damp with sweat and sticking up all over the place.
He grunted when he saw me. “Who are you?”
I grabbed his wrist and held it up so I could see the ID bracelet they’d put on him.
“This says John Doe,” I said. “Your name is Thomas Brandt.”
His eyes went wide with alarm, but he said nothing.
“On August 17, 1997, you T-boned a police car and killed a policeman.”
Brandt swallowed hard. I saw his Adam’s apple work up and down like he was trying to force himself to breathe.
He tried to pull his hand away from me, but I held him fast.
“Sixteen years later you crashed into an SUV and killed a woman and her two children.”
I was seething inside, but my voice was flat. I squeezed his wrist tighter.
Horror spread across his face. “Who are you?”
“You know what you’ve done? Your entire life has been about causing hurt and misery. You miserable little sack of shit. You think you can kill yourself and make it all better? Because you can’t. You have caused more pain than your life can ever make up for.”
“Oh my God,” he said and rolled off the bed. He yanked his arm out of my grasp and staggered backward. “You’re one of those pig men.”
He fell into the plastic curtain and pulled it to the floor.
Nurses and doctors stopped what they were doing and stared at us. But all my attention was on Thomas Brandt.
He climbed to his feet and backed away from me, his eyes wild with panic and fear. “You’re one of those pig men.” He looked wildly around the emergency room, pointing at me. “Pig man! He’s a pig man!”
All around the room people were staring at him, and then at me. Brandt grabbed one of the nurses by her collar and pointed at me.
“Don’t let him get me. You see what he is?”
The woman pushed him away, and he backed into the hall.
I followed after him.
Brandt ran down the hall, raving the entire way, and charged through the doors that led to the stairwell. I broke into a run and reached the doors just as he was rounding the landing below.
“Brandt, stop!”
&nbs
p; He screamed and ran faster.
I charged down the stairs. I felt intensely focused. The rage that had burned so hotly within me as I went through Brandt’s belongings back at his house had narrowed to a fine and deadly point. My whole body was humming with electricity and it seemed the rest of the world lensed out of focus. Brandt was the only thing that mattered. Putting my hands around his throat and choking his life away was the only thing that mattered.
I heard him skid to a stop two floors below me.
He let out a scream.
I was on him a moment later. But he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes had gone wide again and he was backing away from a side corridor.
“Leave me alone,” he pleaded. “Please.”
I heard a hammering sound coming from the corridor to my right and I spun around toward it. Halfway down the hall, one of those pig men stood over a body on a slab, hacking away at it with a cleaver. He wore a black suit covered with a blood-spattered butcher’s apron.
He locked eyes on me and slammed the cleaver into the slab, then started toward me, taking off his apron as he came.
Brandt was running downstairs again, screaming like a lunatic.
I drew my pistol and leveled it at the creature.
“He’s mine,” I said through clenched teeth. “You can’t have him.”
The creature stopped, its hands opening and closing in a gesture that might have been frustration.
“Stay back,” I said.
Below me I could hear Brandt throwing open a set of doors. I turned and went after him. At the bottom of the stairs a doorway opened to the basement. Greenish overhead lights sparked and sizzled and mechanical generators and water pumps snapped and bumped with a deafening noise.
Brandt was standing in the middle of the room in a pool of green light with nowhere left to run.
He turned to face me, tears streaming down his face.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted. “Go away!”
Rage washed over me again and I charged him. I flew into him, driving my shoulder into his chest and sending him sprawling across the floor.
I didn’t give him a chance to get up.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 18
