* * *
Drexel opened the door to the apartment and tossed his keys onto the counter before realizing Ryan was sitting on the couch with their sister, Lily. Her husband, Wayne, sat in a desk chair he had pulled in from Ryan’s room.
Seeing the shock in Drexel’s eyes, Ryan said, “See, I told you he forgot.” He stood up. “I told him you were coming into town.”
“Into town, but not necessarily here.”
Lily stood up. “That’s the greeting I get?” She smiled and walked over to Drexel, embracing him in a quick hug. She had let her dark brown hair grow, reaching down to her neck. She was dressed in blue jeans and a button-up rhubarb red blouse. A strand of pearls graced her neck with matching pearl earrings.
“Good to see you,” Drexel said.
Lily stepped back, exposing Wayne standing in the background.
Drexel said, “Wayne.” They nodded to each other. Lily’s husband, a man Drexel had tolerated when his sister dated him, and he were minimally friendly with each other after an incident—almost physical—a few years before that involved Ton and Zora as well. Drexel found Wayne to be a preening asshole and wished Lily would see through the charade. Despite the attitude, Wayne was a topflight surgeon and well respected in his field. Added to her corporate attorney work, they made a small fortune each year. While it would be unfair to say Lily prioritized money over anything, that statement in itself would not be untrue. It was just as well his sister and brother-in-law lived in Seattle, for that allowed Drexel to quash the guilt of their broken relationship, to forget. While the rift between them had begun to close after Ryan’s abduction by a mob enforcer, they still had many miles to go.
Ryan, ever the negotiator, suggested a game of euchre. Drexel grabbed a Fuller’s London Porter from the refrigerator, loosened the solid brown tie around his neck, draped the dark brown sport coat on the couch and rolled up his sleeves. He grabbed one of the kitchenette table chairs and sat across from his brother. Lily sat to Drexel’s left and Wayne to his right. Hart circled their legs a few times and then disappeared.
“How long has it been since we’ve played?” asked Ryan.
Drexel let out a heavy sigh, and Lily shook her head. She said, “Fifteen? Twenty years?”
“Do you remember how to play?”
“You never forget. It’s like riding a bike.”
“Then you’ll remember how we always crushed you,” said Drexel.
They played late into the night. Drexel and Ryan won five out of seven rounds, two of which were tight games. Ryan, reminiscent of years ago when they played with their parents, would call trump on the flimsiest of hands but still manage to eek out a point. When Ryan did this against their parents, their dad would howl in frustration. Playing euchre always conjured up memories of their parents. Dad with the can of Coors holding his cards as if his life depended on it. Mom, nursing a glass of merlot, shuffling cards around as if doing so helped her determine a strategy.
Drexel thought about them long after Lily and Wayne had said their goodbyes. They were flying back to Seattle the next afternoon. He recalled his little sister, pigtails secured with daisy bands, playing with the family dog, a Pomeranian Lily had dubbed Fluffy. She loved that dog, and it remained years after Drexel and Ryan had left the family home. He caught himself following the trail of memories, those haunted lanes. His parents appeared in their later years, before their final frailties. And then Zora. Her smile and face appeared close in his mind, almost as if he could touch her face. And then it was too much. He shook his head.
Ryan had already excused himself to bed. They did not discuss the fact that Drexel forgotten their sister’s visit or the fact they had essentially ignored the reason for the visit: Wayne’s attendance at a medical conference. They did not and would not discuss it. Just like their family. Bury it deep seemed to be their living principle. Zora had nudged him out of that shell, exposed the ability to talk intimately. He raised his hand to knock on Ryan’s door but hesitated, and in that hesitation, he lost the will.
He sat in his bed and flipped open his Montaigne and read for a few minutes until his eyes grew heavy. According to the old Frenchman, “A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.”
Drexel, a man either impervious to the world or tortured by insomnia, slept fitfully, waking in the middle of the night cursing for forgetting it was Ryan’s birthday Lily and Wayne visited for.
* * *
Daniela was already poring over photographs in the conference room when Drexel arrived at 7:30 a.m. with a large cup of coffee. “What’ve you got?”
She looked up, caught off guard. “Oh, morning. Yeah, okay.” She put her hand on one of two brown folders in front of her. Each one had a sticky note attached to it, though Drexel was too far away to read it. “This one are nos. Photographs of people walking in or out, but not going to their car. This one,” she put both hands on the other folder, “are potentials.”
“Why?”
“Photos of them in a car in the right time span. Alone. My presumption is that Simon didn’t have a passenger when he transported the body.”
He gestured for the folder, which she handed to him. Her note read “Potentials.” He set his coffee down and pulled out a chair, opening the folder. Each of the photos was marked with a time stamp. On the back, each was further annotated with the names of the officer who shot the photograph and if the person was identified—most of them were not. Drexel recognized a number of individuals from his own canvass of the apartment. He studied the thirty images Daniela had put into this category. “So we know Marshall was taken in his apartment. Forensics didn’t find any blood in the hallway, right?”
“Nothing fresh. So, no, no blood trail from the apartment out.”
“Simon, then, gains entrance to Marshall’s home, knocks him out, preps him for transport there.”
“What do you mean, ‘prep’?”
“He didn’t dismember Marshall at the apartment. I think our assumption that he has a site for that is accurate. One of the photos he sent to us shows Marshall whole—and that’s not at the apartment. So he has to somehow get Marshall from the apartment to a vehicle. Seems likely he did that work of disguising the body in Marshall’s apartment and not the hallway.”
“Right. We were already thinking he did it late at night. Wee hours of the morning kind of stuff. Body goes into a trunk or even the back seat.”
“Without our boys seeing that. They would’ve stopped somebody putting a body in the car.”
“Yeah.”
“So the vehicle either arrived or it was already there.”
“We need to look at who arrived as well as left. We need to compare license plates to the residents’.”
“Let me read them off and you enter them into the DMV search.”
Daniela opened her laptop and logged into the DMV records database. Drexel read the license plate numbers, which she typed in. She wrote down the names of the owners. They did this for the fifteen photographs they felt held out the most potential and then compared it to the list of residents, further subdividing the pile into two categories: those who lived there and those who did not. Most of the vehicles coming and going belonged to residents of the apartment building. For one of those, however, the plate was assigned to a 2005 red Ford Focus instead of Jeep Grand Cherokee, photographed pulling out of the lot at 1:03 a.m. An additional six plates seen in the photographs did not belong to known residents of the apartment complex.
“We’ve got those seven addresses and names. Let’s go pay them a visit,” said Drexel.
Chapter 33
They organized their visits by location, starting with the most southern address and working their way north. The first two addresses had no one home, so Drexel stuck a business card into each door with a note to call him. Daniela wrote next to those two that they would probably have to revisit.
The third address was a few blocks east of the University of Chicago campus. An older apartment building with a light red-brick facade, large bay windows at the rounded corners suggesting towers. The bottom floor was a Dunkin’ Donuts, so Drexel bought them coffee before they buzzed at the apartment lobby’s entrance. A male voice, down in the lower registers, answered. After an exchange of names and why they were visiting, Drexel and Daniela walked up the stairs to the third floor, apartment C. Eric Grant answered.
“Come on in.” Eric was a lanky, tall young man. After a while, Drexel forgot the incongruity of the bass voice to the thin Eric. He offered them coffee before realizing they were carrying cups. He showed them to the living room, whose window looked down on the Dunkin’ Donuts entrance. The furniture looked several years old, a set of photographs hung above the sofa. Eric was included in the portraits with what looked like two different families. Eric sat in the recliner next to the sofa, his back to the window. “How can I help you?”
“As part of an investigation, your name came up,” said Daniela. “Your license plate, registered to a 2005 Ford Focus.”
Eric nodded his head.
“Yes. Red.”
“Yeah, I remember it. I don’t have it anymore.”
“You sold it?” asked Drexel.
“No. I loaned it to a friend—a former friend—and I haven’t seen it since.”
“Did you report it stolen?”
Eric waved his hand. “It wasn’t worth anything at all. I wasn’t going to keep it. And at the time, it wasn’t stolen, really.” He gestured to a photo on the wall behind Drexel. “When Louise and I got married, she had the nicer car and we only wanted to keep one. So I loaned it. Would’ve been nice to get some token payment. He offered once, but never gave me anything. I just never bothered to follow up.”
“Who was this friend—former friend?”
“Malcolm Jersey.”
The surprise registered on Daniela’s face and must have rushed across Drexel’s as well. He said, “Hold on.” He pulled out his phone and swiped through the pictures, finding the one they had of Malcolm. He showed it to Eric. “Him?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s finally a priest, eh? Did he do something?”
“We don’t know. We’re trying to track down some information. What can you tell me about Malcolm?”
“Um, well, let’s see. I mean, what do you want to know?”
“When and where did you meet?”
“At college.” Eric pointed in the University of Chicago’s direction. “We were students together. Both in the Divinity School. I think it was in History of Christian Thought I—and there are six of those classes, so we spent quite a bit of time together. We were a couple of graduate students. Poor. Young.”
“What was he like as a friend?”
“Pretty normal, I guess.”
“What did he like? What did you do together?” Drexel felt like he could not get to answers quickly enough.
“Oh, um, we would study together. Lots of that. But he was big into soccer and rugby, so we’d watch that when it was on. Usually pretty odd hours. We’d commiserate over our students in the classes we assisted in.”
“What kind of classes?”
“Oh, the undergrad religion or history of religion ones. Not big classes, but we still assisted our professors. Graded essays. Held tutoring sessions. That kind of thing. Maybe even gave a lecture here and there. I mean, we led pretty boring lives.” He chuckled. “We were religion students.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I wondered what happened to him.”
“Did you have a falling out?” asked Daniela.
“We did.” Eric nodded two times.
“When?”
“He dropped out of the program before getting his masters. He was only a course or two away plus his thesis work. It was about six or so months after that.”
“Why did he drop out?” asked Drexel.
“There’s a misconception that every student who goes into the Divinity School is a religious person. Mind you, there are plenty of them, but some of us—I include Malcolm and me in that—were not. We were interested in other aspects of religion. But Malcolm found religion. Of the kind that leads you to be a bit fanatical about it. He said he was leaving to devote himself to the lord. Seems he found his calling as a priest. Anyway, I didn’t find religion, and he became increasingly annoying about it. Trying to get me to be religious. Pushy about it. By then, I was a newlywed, and I can’t say my thoughts were much about being religious. So we drifted apart. But not before I loaned him the car. When he didn’t return it, I called it quits with him.” Eric leaned back and shook his head.
“In what faith?”
“Christianity. He was always interested in Orthodoxy with its consistent history. He thought it was the purest form of Christianity because of that and its connection via the Eastern Roman Empire. We had lots of talk about Catholicism’s rise and its potential divergence from Christian historical origins. That’s how I knew he was catching the bug because his arguments shifted from the historical perspective to a personal perspective. And they got angry. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“Must have been two years ago. He called up. Said he would pay for the car. That was it. Never heard from him again.”
Daniela scratched the top of her right hand. “Did something trigger his shift into religion?”
Eric smiled. “That’s more a question for non-divinity students really. Those of us who study religion—whether they admit it or not—are always somehow wrestling with belief or non-belief. If you’re a believer, you’re confronted over and again with challenges to that belief. If you’re a non-believer, you’re probably curious about the role of religion in regards to human life and it’s hard not to see the validity of belief. Or at least how people would come to believe. So, no, I don’t think there was a specific occurrence. I could be wrong, but he never told me.”
“What do you know about Gnosticism or the Cathars?” asked Drexel.
“Wasn’t my area of specialty, so only what we covered in class. But—to answer your question before you ask it—Malcolm was very interested in those aspects of Christian history. He was interested in the mystical or esoteric aspects of most religions. The Sufis. The Gnostics. Kabbalah. The mystics of the Orthodox—St. John, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and so on.”
“How interested?”
“I always thought he’d specialize in that. Write his dissertation on it.”
“Does Simon mean anything to you in relation to the university or Malcolm?”
“Simon. Yeah, that was Malcolm’s father’s name. Died years ago in an oil-rig accident in the North Sea.”
They spoke for another fifteen minutes or so, but they had exhausted Eric’s knowledge of Malcolm so far as it related to the case. For now. If Malcolm was Simon, Eric would see a lot of lawyers in the future. As Daniela and Drexel approached their car, she said, “We got him.”
“We’ve got one of them. Call the captain, give him what we’ve got. We need to get arrest and search warrants pushed through the system.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m driving.”
* * *
After Daniela finished the call with Victor, she called Doggett at Drexel’s insistence. He wanted another detective and two officers to meet them at Malcolm’s apartment complex, but to come in with no lights or sirens. A small group. The trend of heavily armed police showing up in force seemed to Drexel to forewarn the suspect and lower the chances of a peaceful resolution. He understood the desire for overwhelming firepower, but he cringed at the implication. He knew Doggett agreed.
Drexel parked the car a block south of the apartment complex. Warrants were in process, so they waited for Doggett and the patrol officers. After thirty minutes, Drexel saw Doggett walk
up in the rearview mirror. The detective tapped his knuckles on the driver’s side glass and then slid into the back seat, slapping a warrant on top of the driver’s seat. Drexel took it and opened it, verifying he had permission to deprive a person of his freedom. The unis pulled their squad car beside Drexel and rolled down the window.
“Hello,” said Drexel.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Go ahead and park in the lot.” He gestured to the apartment’s parking lot. “Then let’s coordinate.”
As the squad car pulled into the lot, Drexel, Daniela, and Doggett all got out of their car and met the two officers, Shen and Ellis, in the lot.
Drexel said, “So we think this guy is the killer who calls himself Simon. He’s in apartment 406. We go up there. Daniela stays way back. Doggett and I knock on the door. You guys back us up. I don’t think he’s going to resist, but you never know. Got your Tasers?”
Shen and Ellis tapped their Tasers and nodded.
“He’s one part of this team. There are two killers. So we want him alive. Got it?”
Everyone nodded.
“All right. Let’s get us a bad guy.”
“Shen and Ellis, you take the elevators. Doggett and I will take separate stairwells. We’ll meet up in the hallway outside 406. Daniela, stay close to me.”
They walked through the main entrance and separated, taking their assigned paths to the fourth floor. They met up in the corridor and set themselves into position. Doggett stood to the right of Malcolm’s door, his hand on his pistol, with Shen at his back. Drexel stood to the left. He could feel Ellis’s breath. Both of the officers held their sidearms out and ready.
Drexel knocked on the door.
From inside the apartment, “Who is it?”
“Detective Sergeant Drexel Pierce from the Chicago PD. I have some follow up questions for you.”
Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2) Page 27
