by Anne Frasier
On the tray in front of her were a can of soda and a plastic cup of ice. It seemed like a bad idea to drink anything carbonated, but comfort was comfort. Jude introduced herself even though the girl probably knew who she was by now. “Would you like me to open that?”
Unable to speak, Iris nodded. Jude popped the top on the can, lifted and tipped the cup, and poured a few inches, setting both containers on the tray.
The girl picked up a tablet and pen, wrote something down, turned the tablet around. The letters were large and round, almost happy.
You were at the house.
“Yes.”
She wrote something else and turned the tablet again so Jude could see it.
Mom and Dad? Where are they?
She wrote more.
Are they OK?
Jude had hoped to ease into this. Talk a little, get some details if possible, before addressing the death of Iris’s family. That wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t evade a direct question.
“I have some bad news.”
The girl’s expression changed quickly, going from expectation of a welcome reply to dread.
“Have you pressed your button in a while?” Jude asked, indicating the morphine drip Iris could administer in regulated doses.
The girl shook her head, seemed unwilling to dose herself, changed her mind, then pressed her thumb against the button. Jude waited until she saw that Iris was relaxed, a slight smile on her lips and a question in her eyes.
“Your parents are gone. Your brother is gone too.” Because people rarely understood the word gone in this situation, she was forced to elaborate with words she didn’t like to speak. They seemed so cruel. “I’m sorry. All three of them are dead.”
The soda sizzled and snapped, and the clock above the bed came into play, the sound of the second hand something Jude hadn’t noticed before. The girl’s eyes flooded with tears and her face contorted in grief. Her hand lashed out, dramatically sweeping the cup away so hard it hit the wall, the contents exploding. And then she opened her mouth in what looked like a scream. No sound came out. Blood bloomed on the white bandage on her neck.
The door burst open and Uriah appeared. The noise of the plastic cup hitting the wall had alerted him. His eyes went from Jude to the silently wailing girl. Immediately reading the seriousness of the situation, he vanished, shouting for assistance.
Jude had been prepared for overwhelming grief, but she hadn’t been prepared for the violence of Iris’s reaction.
Nurses appeared.
The room was chaos. Someone got permission to sedate the young woman, and a needle materialized and was inserted into her IV. The silent screaming finally stopped. Her doctor joined the chaos, unwrapped the bandage to check the wound. “A suture has ripped. Bring in a kit and I’ll take care of this here.” She turned accusatory eyes to Jude and Uriah. “I’m guessing you gave her the news and didn’t do a very good job of it. My God, you detectives can be heartless. Get out.”
The girl pounded the bed with her fist, demanding attention.
“You can talk to them later,” the doctor told her. “Right now we have to get this bleeding under control.”
“I’m sticking around,” Jude said in the corridor when Uriah gave her a look that said Let’s go.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. “We need to prep for the press conference. We need to brief the task force.”
“I’ll wait. She’s going to want more information.”
“Somebody can call us.”
“And I need information. I want to talk to her before anybody else, before her statement gets muddied.”
Uriah was her superior, but he hardly ever pulled rank. Except now . . . “An hour. If she hasn’t talked to you in an hour, I want you in the office. You can swing back here later. In the meantime I’m putting a couple of officers at her door. Once the news is out that there was a survivor, she could be in danger.”
It was too bad they couldn’t have kept news of a survivor from the press. The media didn’t know the details yet, but it was hard to keep a mass murder a secret for very long. And the fact that an ambulance had roared away from the home, full sirens and lights, left people to conclude the obvious. Someone wasn’t dead.
“An hour,” he repeated.
She nodded and he left.
Thirty minutes later, a nurse found Jude in the waiting area, sipping coffee. “She’s asking about you,” the nurse said. “Her surgeon has reluctantly okayed your visit, but please keep it short, and try not to upset her again.”
Jude set the cup aside and hurried down the corridor.
Inside the room, Iris was propped up in bed. Her bloody sheets had been changed, and her throat had a new white bandage. Someone had replaced her tablet with another, but the pen was the same.
“Would you like me to wash that off?” Jude asked, indicting the blood on it.
Iris shrugged and shook her head.
Aware of the time and her need to be back at the MPD soon, she said, “I have to ask you some tough questions. Are you up for it?”
Iris blinked in the affirmative.
She told Jude there were four intruders, all wearing ski masks.
“How did they get inside?” Jude asked.
They knocked and I let them in!
Iris started crying with odd abruptness, continuing to write as Jude watched over her shoulder.
They started hurting people and I ran and hid. I don’t think they knew I was gone for a long time. I should have tried to call the police, but I didn’t have my phone.
“You did the right thing,” Jude said. “Did anybody talk? Did anybody’s voice stand out?”
Iris shook her head. She was getting tired.
“Were they all men?” Jude asked.
Not sure.
“Can you describe any of them?”
She shook her head.
They were wearing black ski masks.
That information matched the poor-quality video footage supplied by a house on the block.
Iris couldn’t ID them, but the intruders might not be sure of that. And more, they might still want their number eight.
“That’s enough for now,” Jude told her. It was late. Almost midnight. “I’ll be back in the morning to check on you,” she said. “If you think of anything else, write it down and have a nurse give it to one of the officers who’ll be standing guard at your door.” She was leaving when Iris tapped the tablet, then held it up for Jude to see.
Catch the people who killed my parents and brother.
The eyes looking at Jude were flat. It wasn’t unusual to see such lack of emotion in a victim, but Iris had been crying just minutes earlier.
There was no denying the girl had been through the unthinkable. She’d almost died, but something was off. It was too early for Jude to mention her vague and unformed suspicion, if you could even call it that, to Uriah. Instead, she planned to take a mental step back, watch, and wait. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that the last ten minutes had been a performance put on for her benefit.
CHAPTER 35
Uriah walked through the skyway.
The art-deco Emerson Tower had once been the tallest and most impressive building in downtown Minneapolis. More recently it had been converted from a hotel to apartments as part of the mayor’s “Stay in the City” campaign, but half the building was still empty. It was close to one a.m. and the lobby, with its Italian marble floor, was deserted.
He stepped into the elevator and punched the button. The door closed. As the car ascended to the seventeenth floor, he leaned against the wall of African mahogany and closed his eyes.
He wasn’t sure when he’d last been to his apartment. Seemed like twenty-four hours, but maybe it was longer. Maybe it had been two days. Back at the police department, Jude had seen he was fighting another migraine.
“Go home,” she’d told him. “Even if it’s just for a couple of hours. Take a shower. Rest. I’m going to run home too. Feed the cat,
catch some sleep.”
He didn’t argue. He needed sleep. In a bed, not just five minutes grabbed here and there, waking up hunched over his desk, drool on his face. Real sleep, plus the right meds, might reverse the headache. From experience, he knew if he caught it early enough, he could sometimes halt the progression.
The elevator lurched to a stop. He stayed where he was, too tired to move. With a jerk of awareness, he finally stumbled into the hallway. As he approached his door, his tired brain registered something odd. A person. On the floor. Male, dressed in jeans, chambray shirt, salt-and-pepper hair. The man was curled on his side, his back to Uriah, head on a canvas bag he was using for a pillow. Homeless? Maybe slipped into the building by following a resident through the main door. Pretty much anybody could get into a secure building that way. Everybody wanted to be helpful.
Uriah’s brain was so far gone he couldn’t prioritize what to do next. Let him sleep, or check to see if he was all right. Checking on him seemed like the best choice.
He shook the guy’s arm. “Hey, buddy. Wake up. You okay?”
The man groaned, then rolled onto his back.
Staring up at Uriah was a familiar face.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Not the best greeting, Uriah realized.
His father, Richard Ashby, pushed himself to a sitting position and scooted his back to the wall. “I came to see my son. You have a problem with that?”
Uriah extended his hand and his dad grabbed it. “No, but I have a problem with my sixty-year-old father sleeping on the floor.” He pulled him to his feet.
“Sixty is the new fifty.”
Uriah’s head was throbbing harder now, and odors had intensified, always a bad sign. He could smell the leather of his father’s regulation shoes, and the deodorant he’d used since Uriah had been a kid. Old Spice. People said Uriah looked more like his mother than his father. It was true, but he had his dad’s curly hair.
“You don’t look so hot,” his father said.
“I feel like shit.”
“I’ve been watching the news about the murders. You never called me back, so I decided to drive up.”
His dad was recently retired from the police force, and it wasn’t going well at home. “He doesn’t know what to do with himself,” Uriah’s mother had told him. She still worked full time, and Uriah imagined his father sitting alone in their two-story house, waiting for his mother to return. It was a sad situation, the loss of identity and the feeling of no longer being useful. Suggestions of things that might occupy his time were met with scowls. He was not someone who’d be happy with a hobby.
“I’m sorry,” Uriah said. “I meant to call back, but you know how time gets away when you’re deep in a case.”
Even though his father had worked in a small town his entire career, he was no stranger to evil and horrific crimes. He’d spent three years on something called the Skunk River case. A family murdered while they slept, the location—a sleepy rural community—along with the motive of robbery, reminiscent of In Cold Blood, the case documented so well by Truman Capote. Uriah had an original copy of the book.
His father had eventually solved the murders, but his absence during that period, even when he was physically present, had been a pervasive part of Uriah’s childhood. Once the case was closed, once it was found to have been perpetrated by two men who were just looking for money to buy meth, the resolution had been unsatisfactory, and Uriah’s father had gone into a deep depression. Uriah and his brother quickly learned to slink around the house, learned not to converse with him, spoke in low tones, kept the TV turned down, went to bed when they were supposed to, tried not to fight, because any of those things could set him off.
“I’ll fix you something to eat,” his father said once they were inside the apartment.
Uriah’s migraine was too far gone for food. The thought of eating made him feel nauseated. Amplified odors wafted to him from the antique books lining the wall shelves. He could even smell the molded plastic of the television and the lingering aroma of the coffee he’d brewed last time he’d been home. “Maybe later. I need to crash.”
“Another headache? You’re getting those more lately, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Stress?”
“Could be.” He had to stop talking. “You can use my room. I’ll take the couch.”
“Absolutely not. You need sleep more than I do.”
Uriah didn’t argue. He managed to find a blanket and pillow for his father, down some pain medication, and fall into bed, an arm across his eyes.
Sleeping never came easy with skull-splitting migraines, but for Uriah it was a deep escape once it did arrive.
He woke up three hours later, the haze of the drug still in him, but at least the blinding pain was gone. He’d walk through the next twenty-four hours in the lethargic second phase of the attack, something called postdrome. It wasn’t the drugs that caused the lethargy. His world always became cloudy and buffered afterward, no matter what. Lewis Carroll had suffered from migraines, and it was suspected he’d written both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass during the postdrome stage. Descriptions of postdrome varied, but Uriah likened it to moving through air that had turned liquid.
Time was five a.m. Pigeons were cooing somewhere, and early-morning sunlight managed to cut through a crack in the black bedroom curtains. He showered. When he stepped out, he caught a whiff of freshly brewed coffee.
The apartment was a small one-bedroom with a kitchen off the living room. Shortly after Uriah’s wife had died, he’d sold their house and moved here, even though apartment living had never been on his radar. He’d deliberately wanted to distance himself from reminders of the traditional life they’d shared, so he’d chosen something out of character, and here he was. It suited his new lifestyle of all work and no play, but he’d been unable to part with some of his belongings, especially his book collection.
“How many eggs?” came a shout from the kitchen.
Uriah pictured a serving of slimy grease and his stomach lurched. “Just coffee.”
He dressed and joined his father in the kitchen.
“You need to stay nourished.” His father stood in front of the stove, towel over one shoulder. “It’s especially important when you’re working long hours like you are now.” He poured a cup of coffee, then put the carafe back on the hot plate.
“I’ll survive.” Uriah sat down at the small table.
His dad slid eggs onto a plate and parked himself across from his son. “Will it bother you if I eat?”
“No.” It would. “I thought you were supposed to quit eating eggs.”
“I don’t eat them that much.”
Uriah was sure he’d heard something from his mother about a strict diet of oatmeal and fruit for breakfast.
“Mom sent you to check on me, didn’t she?”
His dad let out a snort. “We were both worried, but she made the suggestion. Can’t get anything past you.” His father put one slice of dry toast on the table in front of Uriah. “These homicides, the unreturned calls. We were worried.”
Uriah picked up the toast, eyeballed it, munched a corner, but mainly sipped coffee while giving his father a rundown on the murders—“For your ears only”—starting at the beginning. “We have reason to believe it’s about numbers,” he said. “Have you heard of the Fibonacci sequence?”
“The patterns of nature?”
“Yeah. The murders, if we include killings in a nearby Wisconsin town, all follow the sequence. Seven deaths in the latest massacre. Should have been eight, but one person lived.”
“What’s the next number?”
“Thirteen.”
His father got a holy shit expression on his face.
Uriah looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve gotta go.” He rummaged through a kitchen drawer, found a spare apartment key, and put it on the table in front of his dad. “I don’t want to find you sleeping on the floor again.”
>
He finished getting dressed, slipping his badge into the inside pocket of his jacket and belting his gun around his waist as he returned to the living room.
“I’m coming with you,” his father announced. When Uriah hesitated, he added, “A ride-along. You do those, don’t you?”
“Not in the middle of a big investigation.”
“I’d like to meet your partner.”
Uriah imagined the encounter. Encounter? Yes, it would be an encounter. She’d be polite and distant, the way she was with everybody. And there was also the element of family and fatherhood that might be awkward.
“Partners are important. A good partner looks out for you.”
“She does. Okay, come on.”
Just after six a.m., Uriah and his father passed through the double glass doors into Homicide. The place was already buzzing, officers moving quickly, coffee in hand, some on phones, some looking at desk monitors as unforgiving sunlight poured in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Even Detective McIntosh, who typically slid in at seven, was at her desk. Someone shoved a stack of papers into his hand. “Tip-line calls from last night,” the officer said.
He thanked her, rallied everyone nearby, and dove into instructions for the day, allocating tasks. “One thing we need to focus on is Tristan Greer. Why was he late for the dinner? If he’d been there and been killed, that would have made nine people. How did the killers know the number attending? Was it random? Luck? I think somebody in that house knew the killers. Right now Greer is a prime suspect.”
Jude swiveled her monitor so he could see the screen. She’d been watching interview footage of just the person he was talking about.
Even though there’d been a lot of press about Jude, Uriah’s father did a poor job of hiding his double take. Uriah tended to forget the way her quiet presence filled a room. He introduced them, and Jude stood and put out her hand.
She was still too thin, and that thinness made her look even taller. Her dad, not a tall man, had to look up. She surprised Uriah by smiling warmly and greeting his father with something close to affection, her voice gentle and smooth. Uriah could see his dad’s shoulders relax, and saw a return smile that was usually reserved for friends and family.
