Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2)

by Patrick Kanouse

  Drexel nodded.

  Wilcox slapped the top of the car and walked away, followed closely by Graham. Drexel and Daniela stepped out and marched up the wet grass to the command center. Wilcox stood at the top of the stairs that led into it, looked at Graham, nodded, and closed the door behind him.

  Graham tucked her thumbs over her belt. “I’ll brief you.” She nodded to the porch, where all three walked and then huddled.

  Trooper Eric Nichols had driven to the cabin after Victor’s call to Wilcox while the warrant was sitting with the judge. Everything had seemed okay, so he left. When the judge signed off, Nichols returned with two other troopers and a detective in a separate car to serve the warrant. They expected to secure the place and call Chicago PD. Instead, as they drove up the road between Betty’s house and Benoit’s cabin and were within a hundred yards, a gunshot cracked the windshield of Nichols’ vehicle, striking Nichols in the shoulder. He slammed the car into reverse and gunned it but had forgotten about the trailing car, which he smashed into. The troopers and detective abandoned their vehicles to find cover. Gunshots continued to hit the patrol cars, and they were unable to locate from where or who was shooting at them. They assumed the shooter was in the cabin. Graham poked a finger on the map she held in her hand: Benoit’s cabin. The troopers and detective had retreated out of the woods and radioed in that they were under fire. Wisconsin State Patrol established a perimeter in the area three hours ago. While they believed the shooter to be Benoit, they were not certain. SWAT and the captain were reviewing tactical options. The perimeter was closed around the cabin at two hundred yards.

  “Is Nichols okay?” asked Drexel.

  “He’ll make it. He’s at the hospital.”

  “So what’s the situation now?”

  “We’ve got two choppers in the air and SWAT has been advancing cautiously on the cabin. Just trying to get into position for whatever option is taken.”

  “Any more shooting?”

  “No.”

  “So we wait?”

  Graham nodded. “I need to go now.”

  They watched her enter the command center. Drexel sat down on one of the porch chairs, damp from the persistent drizzle even though the porch was covered. Daniela sat in a different chair. They spent the next hour waiting. She swiped, tapped, and touched her smartphone. He called Victor to let him know of the situation. According to the captain, news coverage had begun, referring to a breaking story but no video yet. Drexel looked up and spotted the two state patrol helicopters and then a third. He told his captain the news’s lack of video would soon be remedied.

  The command center door popped open, and Wilcox, his eyes to the sky, stormed down the stairs. “Motherfuckers.” He held his hand to his brow and scanned and grunted when he saw the media helicopter. Another trooper had followed Wilcox out. He grabbed the trooper’s arm. “Get in one of those vehicles and drive down the road at least a mile. Hold off the press there. We don’t know if this guy is loose. That should keep them back.”

  The trooper nodded and then sprinted for one of the cars. Wilcox looked back at Drexel, shook his head, and returned to the command center, the door slamming closed behind him.

  And so they waited for another half hour. Three shots sounded through the woods. They were separated by someone taking aim, at least that is what Drexel thought. Another shot. Another shot. All from the same gun. Then a return shot followed by a rising swell of return fire. He lost count after fifteen. And then the sounds of birds in flight, the thumping of helicopters, and the running generator on the command center the only noise. Daniela looked at him. “It’s over,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s always over for the bad guys. They just don’t know it yet.”

  “Benoit was a bad guy then?”

  Drexel nodded. “If he holed himself up in a cabin and started shooting at people, I’d say he’s a bad guy.”

  “But he might not be the Simon killer.”

  “He might not. Probably isn’t.”

  She crossed her arms. “If he wasn’t, do you think we drove him to this?”

  He had to remind himself she was not a cop, never had been, did not have the experience detectives and beat cops build over time. “I’ve learned there’s never any one thing that forces someone to do something. It’s an accrual of things over time. Decisions, some minor, some major, that lead to a set of circumstances.” He looked down at the porch’s wooden planking. “It’s like when the Bulls lose a close game and people complain about the foul called in the last minute. That call was only a single event in a chain. Maybe it altered the tone, maybe it was unnoticed at the time. Thing is, if the Bulls had made two more free throws, they would have won. No one complained about them missing those, right? Point is, I don’t think Benoit holed himself up in his cabin to have a shootout with police because we started investigating him. I think he made a lot of other decisions that led to that. We made decisions. Others made decisions. But his decision to aim and shoot is all on him.”

  She gave him a wan smile. “But we may have been the thing that pushed him over.”

  Drexel shrugged. He had no answer for why people did what they did other than they did it. Even when motives were clear, they were mysterious, he thought. Impenetrable beyond their surface. He recalled a philosopher Zora had read, Gasset or Ortega or something, and how he described the only thing you can ever know is yourself and inside yourself. What a cut felt like to you might be completely different to someone else and a person had no way to ever be certain about another’s experience. He found this both reassuring and disturbing at the same time.

  The command center door crashed open, and Wilcox followed by Graham and four other troopers descended the stairs heading for two cars. Graham caught Drexel’s attention and thumbed toward their Chicago PD Taurus. He got up and jogged to it, hearing Daniela’s footsteps behind him.

  They trailed the two patrol cars until they reached where Nichols had abandoned his car. All of them stepped out. A siren could be heard in the distance. As he passed Nichols’ car and the one he had crashed into, Drexel saw that the damage was not severe. Their respective fenders had become twisted together enough that abandoning the cars had been prudent.

  A SWAT officer dressed in green and brown camouflage, his M4 carbine slung with the barrel pointed down across his back, jogged up to Wilcox. Drexel hung back out of respect to Wilcox’s jurisdiction over the scene. The SWAT officer made no attempt to hide his report:

  “Sir, we approached the cabin from a three-sixty degree perimeter. About twenty yards out, the suspect opened fire with three shots. One of which hit Cooper. The suspect fired another shot. Hitting Cooper again. We advanced. When the suspect shot again, we opened fire on the cabin and then breached it. We found the suspect on the floor. Wounded. He’s secured now.”

  “Cooper?” asked Wilcox.

  The SWAT officer shook his head. Wilcox breathed heavily and scratched his neck. “Suspect’s status?”

  “We hit him. He needs a medical evac. Not looking good.”

  “That’s on its way.”

  The officer nodded once and turned to face the cabin. Wilcox looked back at Drexel. He thrust the cigar in his mouth. “I assume you know how to handle a crime scene Pierce?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Then go.”

  The sirens were closer. They would be at the crashed cars in a few minutes.

  Drexel walked to the cabin, passed the SWAT officer at the door. Benoit was lying on the floor in the main room. Glass littered the room, with small spikes of it stuck in the frame and lattice. Bullets had punctured the couch, exposing tufts of yellow foam. He had a chest wound. His upper-right shoulder was covered by a towel and an officer applied pressure. Blood pooled on the floor beneath Benoit, creeping toward the officer’s boot. Drexel could tell Benoit was not going to make it. The b
ullet had torn up his insides. He was shocked to see him with his eyes open. Drexel knelt down beside him. “Benoit. Benoit.”

  The dying man looked at Drexel.

  “Are you Simon?”

  The SWAT officer looked up briefly.

  “Are you Simon?” asked Drexel again.

  Benoit only blinked. He may have recognized Drexel. Drexel stood up and stepped away. They were not going to get anything from the Missing Persons’ detective. He looked at Daniela. “Go to the boat shed. See if you get anything there. I’ll look here.”

  She nodded and walked by two EMTs bolting through the door. They ran up and knelt by Benoit, relieving the SWAT officer from applying pressure. He raised his hands—nitrile gloves glistening with blood—and stepped back. Drexel saw his name plate. “Jennings?”

  Jennings looked up. He nodded, pulled off the gloves, and took off his helmet. He drew his hand through his hair, damp from sweat. “He didn’t say anything. He was on the floor when we burst in. We secured the weapons. And then attended to him.”

  “Sorry.” He could not think of much else to say. He walked to the back of the cabin to get out of the EMTs’ way. After pulling on a pair of purple nitrile gloves, he opened drawers, examined beneath the mattress and bed, slid open the closet and checked the clothes, the shoes, the boxes. He found nothing out of the ordinary. Some of the boxes contained stacks of photos in his family’s happier days—even photos from Marseille with names on the back like Pierre, Marcel, Annette, and Camille.

  His phone rang with the rhythmic force of what many described as tanks entering combat from the Holst composition. He answered without looking at the caller-ID. “Pierce.”

  Daniela said, “Better get down here.”

  He hung up, stuffed his phone in his pocket, and walked into the hallway that led to the living room and the front door. Benoit was gone. A bloody pool where he had once been. SWAT had left the cabin and were standing outside. The drizzle had become a rain. A pleasant rain of drops hitting leaves and adding a second rhythmic line to the sounds of the forest. Wilcox was standing alone, inhaling on the cigar whose end glowed orange. The trooper looked at Drexel. “That sorry ass had the nerve to up and die on the way to the hospital.”

  “He didn’t look good.”

  “A bit of justice for Cooper I guess. Though I would prefer to see him rotting in jail for the rest of his life for that.”

  “Sorry about Cooper.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Unable to find anything else to say, Drexel turned and walked the wet, dirt path to the boat shed wondering what was so important to Benoit that two people died.

  Chapter 28

  Drexel found Daniela leaning over a metal box next to a space in the floor where she had lifted up a floorboard now laying against the wall. She looked up at him.

  “He’s not Simon.”

  Drexel nodded. The metal box’s formerly well-defined corners were dented in, giving it the appearance of a rounded rectangle. The dark gray metallic-looking paint had flaked off in several places, which had rusted.

  “But he wasn’t a good guy.”

  “I figured once he started taking shots at cops, he lost the adjective ‘good’ before any references to him.”

  “Yeah, but—.” She held out a stack of Polaroids. “Just look.”

  He took them from her hand and started flipping through them. He looked around the shed. The backgrounds of the photos matched the shed with its light-colored wood, the manufacturer’s faded red stamp visible. In each of the photos a person sat in a metal chair, duct-taped at the wrists and mouth. Their heads slumped over to the side. A bullet hole near the center, above the nose. He held a dozen such photos in his hand. When he looked back at Daniela, she had pulled out a Polaroid camera with two packs of film still in the box and a key. “They still make Polaroids?”

  “Yeah, they’ve had a bit of a resurgence. Nowhere near their heyday. This camera is an older model. Still works though.”

  “The key?”

  “Looks like a safe-deposit box key.”

  He looked back at the photos. “These look like proof-of-death photos.”

  “But he kept them?”

  “Or he kept a copy.”

  “And I found this.” She walked to the back of the shed and reached for the wall, sliding her thumb into a small oval dip in it. The dip looked natural, but Daniela used it to open a door. The small closet revealed what only could be described as a set of torture implements. Jumper cables, wrapped in a nice circular bundle, hung from a hook. A set of pliers, tweezers, knives, and sacks. “A lot of them still have blood on them.”

  “Are we sure he’s not Simon?” A question more to himself than to her.

  “He’s not. No way.”

  “Yeah. Everything here lacks the ritual, the—the—the religious aspect. This is cold. This is hard. Professional.” Was Benoit a mob enforcer? Freelance perhaps. Gangs or what passed for the mob these days delivered double-crossers, liars, and failures to Benoit, who took care of the problem. “Let’s leave this for the troopers. It’ll be their mess to decipher. They may enjoy explaining what a shit this guy was. Probably a few unsolved cases will finally get closed.”

  They walked back up to the cabin. Wilcox stubbed out a cigar on the ground and pocketed the remains. “Well?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Benoit was some kind of enforcer I’m guessing.”

  “Ah, shit. Thanks Chicago for bringing us this.”

  “Hey, we were hoping for something else, but he ain’t our guy.” Drexel extended his hand to Wilcox. “Thanks for letting us look. Everything’s back the way it was and Daniela took photos before anyway.”

  Wilcox shook Drexel’s hand. “Safe drive back.”

  As they drove out of the woods, they knew Simon was still loose, but one suspect had eliminated himself.

  * * *

  He slipped into the apartment a few minutes after nine. Hart darted up to him and purred his hello. A note on the counter from Ryan read, “Out on a date with Alicia. Don’t wait up for me. Wink wink nudge nudge.” Drexel mumbled, “Good for him,” before slipping the paper sack off the bottle of Bulleit Frontier Whiskey. He poured a finger into a glass and drank it neat. Poured another.

  After a shave and shower, he ordered a pizza and poured two fingers of whiskey with a splash of cold water. While he waited for the food to arrive, he switched on the TV and avoided the news, though he did catch a glimpse of a report on Benoit, headlined “Cabin Standoff Ends in Bloodshed” before he flipped the channel. He landed on a reality show about proving or disproving urban legends or old wives’ tales, but he barely paid any attention. Hart curled up next to him, and he held the glass of whiskey more than he drank it. It had been a long time since work had left him this drained. The pizza arrived, and he paid the delivery woman along with a tip. He ate the pizza with as much attention as he gave the TV show. He put the rest of the pizza in the refrigerator, freshened his glass of whiskey, and sat on the balcony with the door open. Zora’s iPhone played Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis through the connected speakers. Zora had always liked Glass’s work more than Drexel did, but this piece had always drawn him in. The set of double chords descending down the scale with the brief pause between them and the last chord a slight return up had a melancholy tone that seemed to suit his worldview. The double chord shifted to a single rhythmic chord. Minimalistic decorative motifs would come in and out and disappear.

  He would never claim to be sad, but he had experienced enough loss, seen enough tragedy to know in very real terms how fleeting this life was. He understood for himself at least the innate beauty of the world, of living, and that it would all remain even when he stopped perceiving it. And this thread, this knowing that it would last beyond him no matter how depraved humanity could be, sa
ved him. And pieces like Metamorphosis and its reliance on both the constant and the mercurial reinforced or opened up this view.

  He sat through parts one through four. The glass was empty at the end and he walked back in, ensuring Hart was inside before closing the glass door. He fell asleep on the couch with part five playing, a partial glass of whiskey on the table, and Hart curled up on his stomach.

  * * *

  The next day at the station began with writing up the report of the previous day’s events, which now seemed like years ago. As he banged at the computer, drinking cup after cup of terrible police coffee, he struggled to not theorize about Benoit’s motives or past. “Stick with the facts. Just the facts,” were Doggett’s instructions for writing reports. After he finished it, he printed it and gave it to Daniela for her review and signature. She read it, had no adjustments, and signed off. Drexel slipped it into a Chicago PD dark brown folder and knocked on Victor’s door, entering after the muffled grunt.

  He handed the folder to Victor. “There’s our report on yesterday’s incident with Benoit.”

  Victor scratched his right cheek as he stood up. “The commander wants to see this and see it now.” He shook the mouse on the mouse pad. “And he wants you there, too.”

  Drexel nodded in resignation and followed his captain.

  One of Sobieski’s more intelligent actions, one even Drexel acknowledged, was to locate himself not in the building where his main supervisory functions were conducted—Central Division—but in Chicago PD headquarters in Bronzeville. The decision gave Sobieski outsized influence in the upper ranks. He had secured a space near the superintendent, though not as close as the deputy superintendent or several others, but close enough to be seen regularly, to interact, to get his say and view in.