by Pandora Pine
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Ten’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Cap came back with the ballistics report on the bullets this morning and said the gun that fired those bullets was Tony’s service piece.”
“I was going to mention that. I tried to keep Mark talking to me and while that was going on, I got a look at the gun. I’d know it anywhere after serving next to Tony for all of those years in Homicide.”
“Fitzgibbon says they’re working on finding out where he was before they can make a move.”
“That’s standard operating procedure. Real policework isn’t like Law and Order. When something like this happens, cops don’t charge out of the squad hellbent for leather and start arresting people willy-nilly.”
“Always with the insults for Law and Order.” Ten laughed. “Enough stalling, babe. What happened next?”
Ronan sighed. Ten was right, he was stalling. “I started getting this hinky feeling. I turned to go back into the house because my gut told me I needed to get away from this kid. I turned away to climb the stairs and he grabbed my elbow. The hand that grabbed me was much stronger than it should have been, Ten. I mean, this kid is what, 5’6” at the most, right?”
“Yeah, he’s a small kid,” Tennyson agreed.
“The grip he had on me was strong enough to leave a bruise.”
“I’ll check for that when we’re done.”
“He was strong enough to pull me back off the first step. Then, something weird happened, Ten. When I looked at him, it wasn’t Mark I was looking at. I mean it was, but it wasn’t. Does that make any sense to you?”
“A little, but keep talking,” Ten urged. “Did things keep getting weirder from there?”
“Yes, his voice changed too. It didn’t sound like Mark’s anymore and it got deeper. Like I said, I tried to keep him talking and the one thing he told me was that he had a kill list. When I asked who was on it, he told me, but it was the words he used that made me feel even hinkier thank before.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that Fitzgibbon and Jace Lincoln were on the list, so was my precious psychic and the one who got away.” Ronan was quiet to give Ten a chance to figure it out.
“Oh my God,” Tennyson gasped. “Ronan, Rod Jacobson called me your precious psychic. Greeley was the one that got away from him twice. I wondered about this when I saw the hair, but Jesus. This is bad, this is really bad.”
“What? What’s bad?” Was Ten upset about the kill list?
“We both know the kind of kid that Mark is, eager to please, looking for love. His mother chose drugs over him and that bounced him into foster care. His spirit vibrates at a low frequency making him especially appealing. This kind of personality makes him vulnerable to possession.”
“What, you mean like by controlling men in a BDSM kind of a situation?” Christ, that was the last thing the Abruzzis needed, some Fifty Shades bullshit going on in their son’s bedroom.
“I wish it were only that. No, Ronan, I mean that makes him vulnerable to possession by evil or malevolent spirits.”
“Like in The Exorcist?” Ronan snorted.
“As a good Catholic boy you should know that movie was rooted in fact. The Rite of Exorcism is real. So is spirit possession. Obviously, Rod Jacobson wasn’t finished with his work on Earth and he found the right person to finish the job for him.”
“You’re serious?” Ronan was silent for a moment. “You really think the spirit of Rod Jacobson is possessing Mark Abruzzi?”
“There’s only one way to find out. I need to try to channel Rod Jacobson,” Ten said quietly.
“Over my dead body!” Ronan bellowed.
31
Tennyson
Ten still couldn’t believe he was on his way to the Abruzzi house to execute a search warrant. He was sitting in the passenger seat of Fitzgibbon’s SUV as they drove through the streets of Arlington.
They lived in a nice suburban neighborhood. Ten liked it there. Arlington was about eight miles outside of Boston, making it an easy commute to work for Tony.
When they’d gotten into the truck, Fitzgibbon had handed Ten the search warrant. He’d never seen one in person. The only ones he’d ever seen were flashed on Law and Order. Tennyson noticed the two items listed on the warrant were Ronan’s missing gun and the weapon used to shoot Ronan.
Fitzgibbon’s people had found out that Tony had been off-duty the day of the shooting. He and Carlie had taken the boys, with the exception of Mark, who’d been complaining of a headache, to the Cape for a beach day.
Not that Tennyson expected to hear any different from the cops investigating the Abruzzis. Ronan said Mark was the one who shot him and Ten believed him. Speaking of Ronan, it just wasn’t the same being here like this without him.
“You okay?” Fitzgibbon asked.
Ten nodded. “Yeah. I was just thinking that it wasn’t the same working without Ronan.” Carson and Truman were back at the hospital with the detective, who still hadn’t woken up from his coma. Ronan’s vitals were stable and his doctors were happy with his progress. They said he could wake up anytime now.
Fitzgibbon grinned. “There aren’t going to be any stoplight selfies on this trip to Arlington.”
“You know about those?” Ten found himself smiling.
“Ronan shows them to me from time to time.” Fitzgibbon sounded a bit jealous.
It warmed Tennyson’s heart to think of Ronan showing him off like that to his boss. Both he and Ronan had pictures like that on their phone lock-screens. “He used to hate when I’d shout out ‘Stoplight Selfie!’”
Fitzgibbon laughed. “I don’t doubt it. Ronan always was a cantankerous bastard.”
Ten couldn’t argue with that. “But after a while, there wasn’t as much bark in his bite. He’d complain, but the looks on his face in the pictures went from being annoyed, to being amused, to being in love.”
“He’s always been in love with you, Tennyson. I think it was a bit of a struggle admitting it to himself after what happened with his first marriage.”
Nodding, Ten looked up at Fitzgibbon. “What’s your story, Cap? I mean you’ve been telling us that you’ve been married to your job since you graduated from the academy, but I don’t believe that. Every man needs companionship, no matter how much he says that isn’t true.”
Kevin frowned at Tennyson. He turned back to the road and frowned harder. The traffic up ahead of them wasn’t moving at all.
“Looks like we’re gonna be here for a spell.” Ten couldn’t help grinning. Everyone thought Ronan had come a long way in his mindset when it came to what Tennyson did for a living. The truth of the matter was that Fitzgibbon had too.
“I might have been in a relationship that went south and broke my heart so badly that I swore off men until my dying day,” Kevin muttered under his breath.
“Saying that it went south is an understatement,” Ten said quietly.
Kevin turned to Ten with a sharp, angry look blazing in his green eyes. “I thought you didn’t read people without their permission.”
Ten could read pain mixed with anger rolling off Fitzgibbon, but he hadn’t gone any deeper than that. “I’m not reading you, but you’re forty-nine years old, Kevin. You’ve stayed away from relationships for almost thirty years now. What happened between you and the other guy wasn’t just a matter of shaking hands and parting ways if it kept you alone for this long.”
Kevin sighed and turned back to look out the windshield at the stopped traffic. “His name was Redmond O’Keefe. We all called him Red. He and I were the top two recruits in our police academy class. No one else came close to matching up to either one of us. The competition between us was so fierce that it nearly came to blows on a couple of occasions. God, I hated that prick.”
“Let me guess, the feeling was mutual.” Ten grinned.
“Yeah. I think that burning hatred was what pushed us both in the beginning. All I cared about was beating him, you know? The lessons didn’t ev
en matter, so long as my name was at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the day.” Fitzgibbon shook his head. His lips curled in a wry smile.
“What happened to change all that?” Ten asked curiously.
“We were running our morning PT. It was just a simple five-mile run. It wasn’t for points or anything it was just part of our daily routine, but Red started taunting me. Telling me that I had thick legs and I was so fucking slow that his eighty-year-old grandmother could beat me in a sprint. Well, I wasn’t about to take that lying down, so I shoved him hard and took off running. He caught up with me and shoved me back. Before I knew what was happening, we were rolling around on the ground.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“Fuck no!” Fitzgibbon sounded offended. “Our training officer saw what happened and came running over. He started yelling at us to get up and when we were back on our feet, he reminded us that we were on the same team and that while we were fighting each other some criminal could have been shooting at other members of our team. It was a pretty sobering moment for all of us.”
Tennyson could well imagine it was. “What happened to turn the tide between the two of you?”
“Red came to my dorm room that night and asked me to come for a walk with him. We agreed to call a truce and work together rather than against each other. We kept our rivalry going, but it was on a friendlier level. We encouraged each other and studied together. We also fell in love with each other.”
“I had a feeling that was coming.” Ten elbowed Fitzgibbon.
“I’d never really fooled around with another guy before, but I trusted Red enough to lose my virginity to him. We had to keep things on the down low. It was different in the early 1990s. We could have been kicked out of the academy if anyone had found out about us.” Fitzgibbon grimaced at the memory.
Ten sighed. He had a bad feeling about where this story was going.
“When we graduated from the academy, we were both at the top of our class. We’d each joined the BPD. I was assigned to a station house in Mattapan, while Red was with a house in Roxbury. We were making plans to get a place together and build a life when…” Kevin’s breath caught in his throat.
Tennyson turned to the captain. He knew instantly that neither man cheated on the other. Neither man walked away. “Oh, Kevin.” Tennyson reached a hand out, setting it on the captain’s shoulder.
“Drug bust went south. Red didn’t make it.” Kevin’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Ten was speechless. He didn’t know what to say. All the time they’d spent sitting at Ronan’s bedside over the last two days and he’d never said a word about his own pain. Not to mention when Kevin had been shot himself back in May. He’d never once mentioned Red.
Tennyson had to wonder why Red had never introduced himself in all the time he’d known Fitzgibbon.
“I’m guessing he isn’t here. Is he, Ten?” Fitzgibbon wiped his quickly.
Kevin’s question sent a chill down Tennyson’s spine. Ten shook his head. He couldn’t bear to meet Kevin’s misty eyes at the moment. “No, he isn’t, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to talk to you. Some spirits keep their distance until they know you want to hear from them. If you want me to try to channel him sometime, you just say the word. It would be my pleasure to reunite the two of you.” Ten set what he hoped was a reassuring hand on the captain’s shoulder.
“I thought I was going to see him again, back in May when I got shot.” Kevin snorted and shook his head.
“We’ll ask him about that night when we talk to him,” Tennyson said. He remembered the doctor saying Kevin surviving the shooting was a matter of a half an inch. Ten was thinking now that wasn’t coincidence.
“What do you mean?”
Ten took a deep breath. “Sometimes spirits can affect what happens in our lives, or in the physical world. Remember how Michael Frye saved the day for me and Ronan?”
Fitzgibbon nodded. “You think Red might have done something like that to save me?” Kevin’s voice was filled with awe.
“It’s worth asking about, don’t you think?” Ten found himself hoping he got to meet Redmond O’Keefe very soon.
“What would I say to him after all these years?”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Cap.” Ten grinned. “This is the Abruzzi house up there. The brown house on the left.” Ten went from feeling giddy over the thought of reuniting Fitzgibbon and his first love to feeling like he was going to be sick over the idea of executing a search warrant on the home of Ronan’s best friends.
“You gonna be okay in there?” Kevin asked.
Ten nodded. “We’re doing this for Ronan. I don’t have any other choice.” He meant it. This wasn’t the time to let his emotions get the better of him. He was going to walk into that house and be professional.
Ten opened his gift wide. Taking a deep cleansing breath, he mentally walked through the entire house. “They’re all home. Carlie is making lunch in the kitchen. The boys are all sitting around the kitchen table studying for their GED final exams and Tony is sitting at the table with them working on the morning crossword puzzle.”
“Can you see the guns, Ten?”
Ten felt a lump in his throat. He swallowed past it and used all of his energy to focus. “The gun that shot Ronan is locked in Tony’s gun safe. It’s kept in the master bedroom in his closet. Ronan’s gun is hidden in… shit!” Ten’s eyes popped open.
“What? What is it?” Fitzgibbon set a hand on Tennyson’s shoulder.
“Ronan’s gun is hidden in a shoebox under Keegan’s bed. Is that going to be a problem?” Ten nibbled his bottom lip.
“Right now, we can’t use any of the information that Ronan gave to you in your little coma chat. We’re simply here to execute a search warrant based on the ballistics that came back on the three bullets the surgeon pulled out of Ronan’s chest. Since the gun that shot those bullets was issued to Tony Abruzzi, it’s on the warrant, since the working theory is that whomever shot Ronan stole his gun as well, it’s within the scope of the warrant to search for Ronan’s missing gun too. There’s no need to arrest anyone at this time. We’ll take the weapons back to the lab and have them analyzed for fingerprints and DNA.”
“And in the meantime, we pray Ronan wakes up and can tell us that Mark Abruzzi shot him.”
Fitzgibbon nodded.
“Just be prepared for Keegan’s fingerprints to be on both guns and maybe the ammo too.” Ten shook his head.
“What are you saying, Ten?”
“If Ronan’s right and the spirit of Rod Jacobson is in control of Mark, it means we’re dealing with his intellect, not the intellect of a seventeen-year-old boy. If Mark gets caught, it’s game over. Jacobson knows that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jacobson had Mark put both guns in a sleeping Keegan’s hand to get his prints and DNA on them. It’s to Jacobson’s best advantage if Mark stays free, especially when there are other people on his kill list.”
“What kill list?” Fitzgibbon’s voice went ice cold.
Oh fuck… Tennyson hadn’t told Fitzgibbon about that part of Ronan’s story yet. “Why don’t we talk about that later, Cap.” Ten went for the SUV’s door handle.
“Don’t move one more muscle, Tennyson!” Fitzgibbon commanded. “Talk, now!”
The tone of Fitzgibbon’s voice alone was enough to make Ten crap his pants. “Cap, please trust me when I say you don’t want to hear this list right now. Let’s go in there, execute this warrant, then, when we’ve gotten what we came here for, I’ll tell you what Ronan said.”
Fitzgibbon smiled. Nearly all of his perfectly white teeth were on display. They looked sharp enough to rip out Tennyson’s throat. “What part of ‘talk, now’ sounded like a suggestion to you?”
Tennyson sighed. “Fine, Jacobson wants to kill you, Greeley, and Jace.” Ten covered his face with his hands and waited for Fitzgibbon to lose his shit. All Tennyson heard was the sound of Fitzgibbon’s door opening.
“You comin
g?” Kevin asked calmly, as if Tennyson hadn’t just told him that the spirit of a serial killer didn’t plan on killing him, his son, and his future husband.
Ten peeked between his fingers at the captain, who looked perfectly calm. He nodded and hopped out of the SUV.
“You thought I was going to lose my mind like Ronan would have done, didn’t you?” Kevin grinned at him through the open door of the SUV.
“I admit nothing,” Tennyson replied. He still wasn’t a hundred percent sure Kevin wasn’t going to go ape shit once they got in the house and he saw Mark. He had to trust that the captain would be completely in control of himself and his emotions, but at the same time, be prepared for anything.
32
Tennyson
Ten followed along behind Captain Fitzgibbon as they headed toward the Abruzzis front door. His heart was pounding in his chest so loudly that that it was drowning out all other sounds around him. He needed to focus harder on what was about to happen.
Fitzgibbon rang the doorbell and stepped back from the front door. “Hand me the search warrant.” He was all business now. In his left hand was an evidence kit.
Tennyson gave it to him and stood behind the captain but off to the side, so that Tony would see him when he opened the door.
“Captain Fitzgibbon!” Tony’s surprise turned to horror at seeing the captain at his door. “Oh Jesus! Is it Ronan? Is he…?”
Fitzgibbon shook his head. “No, Tony. Ronan is stable. He’s still in a coma, but he’s okay for now.” The captain held up the search warrant. “The lab tested the bullets the surgeon pulled out of him, and the ballistics came back to your service piece. We have a warrant to search your house for that gun and for Ronan’s gun that was stolen during the assault.”
“Who’s at the door, Tony?” Carlie shouted as she walked toward it. “Ten, Captain Fitzgibbon, is it Ronan? Is he okay?” All of the blood drained out of her face. She clutched Tony’s arm.
“Carlie, Ronan’s okay. They have a warrant to search the house.” Tony’s voice was tight.
