Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2)

by Patrick Kanouse

  They checked room after similar room. Student desks stacked up against the walls. Blackboards with an eraser or stub of chalk in the tray. Boarded windows. Drexel tried the light switch every time. When he first did it, Daniela looked at him and shook her head. He had responded, “You never know.”

  After forty-five minutes, they found the gym. The James Madison Eagle logo sat in the center of the wood floor covered in dust. The bleachers were folded up against the wall. All the wainscoting protection mats had a thick layer of dust on the top edges.

  “This isn’t it, boss.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  They turned and left the gym, heading toward the exit. As they passed the principal’s and administrative offices, what sounded like an item falling to the floor boomed through the hall. Drexel unholstered his Glock and switched off the safety. He looked at Daniela. “Weapon?”

  She shook her head.

  “Stay back then.” Drexel faced the entrance to the offices. “Chicago PD. Who’s there?” He advanced on the door and stood by it, straining to hear through it. He twisted the doorknob and swung in, keeping the Glock close to his body so someone could not swing their arms down and knock it out. A desk light that had been on the receptionist’s desk when they first examined the area was on the floor. They had been cursory in their search, so they may have carelessly overlooked a hiding place or the man sneaked into the school while they were searching some other part. No way to know. “Police. Who’s there?”

  Daniela was standing at the threshold. He tried to wave her back out, but she did not see or ignored him.

  Drexel darted the flashlight around. Another door was open leading into the offices from the receptionist, one he was sure they had closed. Not bothering to cover his sounds, he moved quickly to the edge of the door and poked the flashlight into the darkness, brightening splotches of air and wall and furniture. The light captured furniture and dust. He stepped in, the pistol raised but held close and the flashlight shining awkwardly into the room. He heard steps. Running. Daniela screeched. He twisted around to the door. A crash of bodies colliding with the floor. He sprinted out to find Daniela on the floor, rubbing the back of her head, and the flicker of a jacket and bottom of a shoe running out of the receptionist area.

  Daniela said, “Go. I’m fine.”

  He nodded at her and sprinted out. The running footfalls came from his left, and he shined the light down the hall and captured a person running in the full beam. “Stop.” He started running after him. This is why he ran to keep in shape—for no other reason than to run down the perps.

  This guy was fast. But Drexel sprinted hard. It was a race to the window at the end of the hall. He heard behind him steps running and trusted it was Daniela and not a second perp, tossed aside the consequences of not having cleared the area properly. Doggett always said that patrol officers knew most of the time the trouble they were headed into but detectives never did. The runner slowed up to keep from crashing into the plywood, putting his foot on the sill. Drexel did not slow down and threw his body into the perp’s back. The plywood did not break. Instead, it lifted up and right, splintering where the nails fixed it to the building, landing a few feet from Drexel and the runner as they landed on the ground, the detective’s elbow knocking the wind out from the runner. The plywood’s corner dug deeply into the ground and held in the air motionless for a brief moment before falling away from Drexel and landing with a soft whoosh and thud.

  “You okay?”

  Drexel looked back and up at Daniela. He nodded. He put his knee into the back of the man on the ground and cuffed him. He rolled him over. The face was familiar, but he could not place it.

  “Holy shit!” said Daniela. “That’s Isaiah. Brittany’s friend. I recognize him from the photos.”

  And he knew she was right. The face of Isaiah McFarlane, friend of Brittany Day, stared up at him, the breath having come back into him.

  * * *

  Isaiah sat in the interrogation room back at the station, staring at the cuffs around his wrists. He was dressed in light-colored jeans and a long-sleeved, red University of Chicago T-shirt. The dark blue Nikes on his feet had not helped him escape Drexel. A light, long raincoat was draped over the back of the chair.

  Victor looked at Isaiah on the monitor that sat on a table in a room next to the interview room. “So he was at the school?”

  “That’s right, boss,” said Daniela.

  Drexel said, “He was a friend of one of our vics, Brittany Day. We found a kit in his jacket.”

  “He was there to dope up?”

  “Looks that way. None of our vics have any evidence they were using.”

  Victor nodded and watched Daniela rubbing her head with ice held in a small Ziploc bag. “We need to make sure you get a gun.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “We’ll see. First, what do we do with him?”

  “Pierce?” asked Victor.

  “Let’s find out why he was there. We’ll leverage the assault and possession charges.”

  “Do you think he’s Simon?”

  Drexel frowned. “I don’t think so, cap. It’s possible, I guess. He kills his friend. Maybe he loved her and she rejected him. He snaps and he starts killing others. Or he kills others to cover up he killed Brittany. But connections to the other vics seem unlikely. That’s why Marshall and Benoit are such good candidates.” He rubbed his chin. “Let’s put together a bunch of photos in a folder and see what happens. Let’s get the gruesome ones.”

  They let Isaiah stew some more as Victor walked to his office and Daniela and Drexel went to the conference room to gather the materials they needed. Drexel closed the door and said, “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Nothing that two aspirin won’t fix.”

  “Okay. Do you want to start running background on him while I interview him—”

  “No way. I want to be in on that. Doggett’s so eager to help, he can start background.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think I need a gun?”

  “I think it makes sense.”

  “I’ll consider it. So why didn’t you like duck down low when you knew someone was around?”

  He closed the folder and smiled. “If you get a gun, we’ll do some drills together and you’ll get a good reason why. Most people shoot for the gut. Big target. So you duck down and—”

  “Your head is now the target.”

  “Bingo. Get a few paintballs to the helmet, and you stop it. If you’re behind cover, then ducking makes sense. But when you’re breaching a room, just go.”

  She smiled. “Let’s see what this dude has to say for himself.”

  * * *

  Daniela uncuffed Isaiah and sat by Drexel across from the kid. Isaiah’s eyes darted back and forth between the two. He had the look of someone shocked to find themselves in a police interrogation room and having been cuffed. He diverted his attention and started looking around the room and spotted the camera in the corner to his right and looking down at him.

  Drexel tapped the table to recapture Isaiah’s attention. “We’re recording this interview. You’re aware of your rights?”

  “Okay. I am.”

  “For the record, what is your name?”

  “Isaiah McFarlane.”

  Daniela stretched over to the cabinet behind her and pulled out the rights notification and release form, a document that repeated the famous Miranda warning in individual lines with spaces for initials after each. She slid the paper over to him. Drexel clicked a pen to write and put it on top of the paper. “You understand you have the right to remain silent, right?”

  Isaiah nodded.

  Drexel poked the line next to the warning. “Initial.”

  Isaiah did. And they worked through the other three warnings. Drexel pulled the sheet of paper back. “Noting for the record that Isaiah McFa
rlane has initialed, signed, and dated that he is waiving his rights.” Looking back at the college student, “You understand you can revoke this waiver at anytime, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.” He breathed out heavily and looked to his right. Then he looked back at Drexel. “What’s this about anyway? So you got me for trespassing. But it’s an abandoned school.”

  The kid had some attitude thought Drexel. “Well, and there’s this.” He grabbed the photo of the kid’s heroin kit and slapped it in front of him. “And this.” The photo of black tar heroin. “How long you been using?”

  Isaiah looked down at the photos and looked up without raising his head. “Not long.”

  “A week? A month? Five years? What’s ‘not long’?” asked Daniela.

  “A few months. All right?”

  Drexel leaned back and crossed his arms. “Since Brittany disappeared?”

  Isaiah nodded.

  “Why? Feeling guilty? Feeling—”

  “Guilty? Why would I feel that? What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying, we’ve got a young woman you knew who’s disappeared and you start injecting H into your veins shortly thereafter? Makes me wonder what triggered it? Why does a smart kid start doing something like that?” He let the implied accusation hang in the air between them. He did not want to give him too much to hang on. Better the story come out with as little prompting as possible. Drexel shrugged.

  “No. No no no no. Man, I had nothing—nothing—to do with Brittany’s vanishing.” He jammed his index finger onto the table. “Nothing.”

  “So tell me. Why’re you mainlining H?”

  Isaiah looked to the side. He curled up his hand into a fist and raised it to his lips and blew hard into it.

  Daniela leaned over the table. “Tell us. We’re hear to listen.”

  He kept looking away.

  Drexel opened the folder with the pictures of the corpses of Simon’s victims. He slapped on the table the photo of the macabre embrace of Bobbi Lawlend and Jared Sales. Slapped the photo of the young Jodi Schmidt. Slapped the photo of Brittany Day.

  Isaiah could not keep his eyes away. And he followed the chain of gruesome imagery as Drexel had put them down, reaching the final image of Brittany. Drexel saw his eyes open wider, watched the recognition sweep across his face, knew in that instant Isaiah was not the killer.

  “No. Holy shit. No. Oh my god.” Tears welled up and streamed down his face.

  Daniela looked at Drexel, and he shook his head. She gave a single nod, picked up the pictures, and slid them back into the folder. “See where we’re going? If you did that to Brittany, then you did that to the others. You’re Simon the Butcher then.”

  Isaiah shook his head. Slowly at first and then more rapidly. “I loved her.” He said it at a near whisper. “I loved her. But she didn’t love me. The night before she disappeared, the last meaningful moments I really had with her I tried to kiss her. She pushed me away. Pushed me away and said, ‘No. I don’t like you like that.’ Still, I tried to kiss her. I grabbed her and tried. She pushed me away, and she was angry. ‘I said, ‘No!’ And she left. And then the next night, I almost didn’t go, but I couldn’t stay away from her. And then she disappeared. I knew something bad had happened. She wouldn’t just disappear. She was so angry with me. Oh god. I thought her last thoughts of me are anger when all I did was love her. I just loved her.” He dropped his head to his chest. “A friend offered me some Vicodin a few days after she disappeared. It was supposed to take the sting out of losing her. It did.” He raised his head up and looked at them. “For a while at least. But I couldn’t afford them. So another friend hooked me up.”

  Drexel nodded, picked up the folders on the table, and walked out. Daniela followed him and closed the door behind him. Isaiah had plummeted fast. Drexel had seen it happen many times before. The kid was on a bad path. He was probably using H to stay functional.

  Daniela said, “He’s not Simon.”

  “Nope. We can bust him for assault and breaking and entering and possession. Not enough here to distribute.”

  She pursed her lips and sighed. “Do we have to?”

  “Charge him?”

  She nodded.

  “No. We don’t.”

  “I think he’s scared enough. He didn’t hurt me badly. We toss the kit and let him go. But we tell him we’re doing this only if he gets into rehab.”

  He nodded. “It’s up to you. I’m okay with that, but you’re the one he assaulted.”

  “I don’t want to mess up his life anymore than it is already.”

  “Okay. You tell him the good news.”

  She smiled. She pulled out a business card and grabbed a pin off Kendall’s desk before walking back in.

  Drexel watched over the monitor as she asked him to write his cell phone number on the card and his parents’ numbers. She was going to check in on him, and if he did not answer, she would call the parents. He flipped off the screen and walked back to his desk. Victor popped his head out of his office. Drexel shook his head. The captain nodded. “But something else has come up. The Wisconsin State Patrol say someone’s barricaded himself at Benoit’s cabin.”

  “Benoit?”

  “They ain’t saying. But get up there. If Benoit’s our guy, he might have cracked and when it goes down, I want us to be there to look at the evidence.”

  Drexel called the Missing Person’s Unit. Benoit had not shown up for work today. Drexel dropped the folders on his desk and grabbed a pair of keys from the motor pool board. He opened the interview room door. He, Daniela, and Isaiah left the building together, splitting at the corner with Isaiah heading for the LaSalle L station.

  As Daniela sat in the passenger seat, she asked, “What’s up?”

  “Benoit’s holed himself up at his cabin. The Wisconsin State Patrol are there now.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Yeah. Not good. And I don’t think Benoit’s Simon. Not anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  As he pulled onto Congress, he gunned the car to speed. “Simon’s been too careful. He’s not going to get caught in Wisconsin.”

  “He might.”

  Drexel shook his head. No. Benoit was something, but he was not Simon the Butcher. Whoever that was, he was probably killing or kidnapping his next victim at that very moment.

  Chapter 27

  Drexel brought the car to a stop at the end of Betty’s driveway. Three Wisconsin State Patrol cruisers and an SUV were parked haphazardly in her yard. A large mobile command center—a souped-up RV—was parked on the flat ground in front of her porch. The state patrol logo, red lettering and single star, white outline of Wisconsin, and blue background, emblazoned the command center’s slide-out floor, which was fully extended. He pulled the car forward.

  A young trooper, her campaign hat covered in plastic, stood as the afternoon Wisconsin sky drizzled enough to make the air feel sodden. “Stop.” Her right hand was straight out and her left was on her pistol grip.

  Drexel stopped and kept both his hands on the steering wheel. Daniela lifted hers so they were visible.

  The trooper walked over and asked him to roll down the window, which he did. Her silver-colored nameplate read “Graham.”

  “Detective Sergeant Drexel Pierce from Chicago PD. The man holed up here is a Chicago cop we’re investigating.”

  “ID.”

  “Yes.” He nodded once. “I have a pistol on me.” He looked at her to see if it was okay to proceed. She nodded. He reached into his sport coat left front pocket and pulled out his badge, which he held toward her.

  Graham looked at it without touching it. “I think we have this under control.”

  He raised his hands a bit off the steering wheel in a gesture calculated to ask if he could relax. She smiled, and he dropped his hands to his lap. “I don’t doubt you
have it under control. It’s just he’s a person of interest—as a suspect—and when this ends—however it ends—we want to be on site for anything that’s relevant. We’re the ones that put the warrant through for searching his cabin.”

  “Hmmm. Hold on.” Graham walked toward the command center, pulled open the door, stepped in, and closed it behind her.

  Daniela leaned her elbow on the door ledge and rested her head against her upraised hand. “I’m guessing we’re here only if they let us stay.”

  “That’s about right. So be nice.”

  “Hey, boss, that’s for you. I’m always nice.”

  After about five minutes, Graham stepped out of the command center followed by a man who put on his plastic-covered campaign hat and placed a short, fat, unlit cigar into his mouth. He walked behind Graham until they reached the hood of the Taurus. He slid his hand along it as he walked up to the window, shaking the water off at the door. He leaned down and smiled around the cigar. “Captain Adam Wilcox. What can we do for Chicago PD? I’m dealing with a bit of a crisis at the moment.” He had the Wisconsin accent in full.

  “Detective Sergeant Drexel Pierce. Pleased to meet you, captain. The man you’ve got holed up there, Benoit Cadenat, is a suspect in a series of murders in Chicago. We wanted to be on site after you guys’ve dealt with him. Could be valuable evidence here that links him to the crimes. We’re the ones that put the warrant through.”

  He chewed the end of the cigar. “Who’s she?”

  “She’s my partner. Daniela Longfurd.”

  “Well, we’re not sure who we have in that cabin back there. It may not even be your guy. But seeing you put in the warrant and old Victor called me up, I’m okay with you riding shotgun.” He tapped the top of the car. “But you’re out of the way until I say you can look at anything. Capiche?”