The Death of Blue Mountain Cat

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t live without him.” The knife moved toward her throat, paused. Her eyes started sweeping from side to side, as if to find something hiding in the field of her peripheral vision.

  Thinnes said, “Lauren.” He kept his eyes on her so that he wouldn’t draw her attention, by a glance, to anyone who might be in a position to creep up on her. Where the hell is Jack? Or the cops? Or anyone?

  “I have to be with him,” Lauren said.

  “You won’t if you do that,” he told her quietly. “They don’t allow suicides in hallowed ground.”

  She thought about that. It took her a long time, maybe thirty seconds. Then she gave a little shrug that caused her to sway like a drunk. “That’s that, then.” The knife moved upward.

  “Wait!” Thinnes said, softly. “Why?”

  “Why? David’s dead.” The knifepoint touched her throat, teasing a bloody drop from its smooth whiteness.

  “Lauren!”

  “I killed him.” A straight statement, without defiance or anger. And scariest of all, without apparent remorse.

  It was all Thinnes could do to hide his surprise. “What for?”

  The knife sagged as she thought about it. “He stopped loving me.”

  “Why kill yourself?”

  “He stopped loving me.” As if it were elementary. As if living without David’s love made the thought of living unbearable.

  The knife started back toward her throat. Christ! Where was the cavalry? Thinnes tried to judge how quickly he could cover the distance between them. Lauren said, “You can’t stop me.”

  Then a huge hand closed over her knife hand, and a long arm circled her from behind.

  “No, but I can,” Caleb said, quietly.

  She fought him, but he was a bear of a man and in good shape. Fighting him was like wrestling a tree. After a while, she stopped and went limp. The knife slipped from her hand and clattered onto the headstone.

  For the first time in half a century, Thinnes took a breath.

  Sixty-Nine

  Sunday morning, Thinnes tracked Caleb down at the Graceland cemetery. Not the one where David Bisti was buried. He waited in his car, parked near Caleb’s rental car, until the doctor turned away from the modest grave near Lorado Taft’s great sculpture.

  As Caleb neared the cars, Thinnes got out of his own and folded his arms on the roof, waiting to be noticed. Caleb seemed far away in his thoughts. Then he stiffened. Thinnes could see alarm cross his face momentarily.

  “Sorry to intrude, Doctor,” he said. “I remembered that you come here sometimes on Sundays.”

  “No intrusion. It’s time I let Christopher go and get on with my life.” He smiled wryly. “How may I help you?”

  There were things in his work that Thinnes could do with phone calls—this wasn’t one. He needed to see Caleb’s face when he talked to him—to better judge the effect of his words and see if Caleb understood them—but he felt uncomfortable. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For the other day with Lauren Bisti.”

  There was more. Caleb seemed to sense it and waited while Thinnes put it together. It seemed stupid to thank a man for doing the right thing, but damn few people were willing to do the right thing if it meant going to any trouble. And fewer still—usually only the cops, who were paid to—were willing to stick their necks out for strangers. But that was what was wrong with the world. And when you found someone who was willing to do what needed doing, you had to say something.

  “Elvis Hale may have been an unmitigated bastard,” Thinnes said, finally. “But he didn’t kill Bisti. Thanks for helping me set the record straight.”

  Caleb nodded. “We all do what we can.” He turned to face the same direction as Thinnes, toward the Crusader statue. Barring vandalism or act of God, it would still be guarding Victor Lawson’s grave when all their bones had crumbled to dust. Artists seemed to leave their works everywhere.

  “What will we leave behind?” Thinnes asked.

  “In your work, you’ve probably influenced countless people for the better. And you’ve raised a decent son. Rob will pass your goodness on to his children, and they on to theirs—perhaps for as long as there’s life on this planet.”

  The blatant compliment caused Thinnes instant embarrassment. But he thought about it. If he’d turned out well, it was because of his parents’ skill as parents…Jesus! It could really get maudlin if you thought about it too much. Then again, Rob could be killed tomorrow—by accident or gang bullet.

  But you didn’t plan it that way. Chances were good that Caleb was right, about Rob and about descendants. “What about you?” he asked.

  “I can only hope my art will help others express their talents.”

  “The words on Bisti’s headstone. What do they say in English?”

  Caleb seemed, suddenly, very sad. “I think it’s a bastardization of a quote from Seneca.

  “‘Life is short, only art endures.’”

  More from Michael Allen Dymmoch

  Caleb & Thinnes Mysteries

  The Man Who Understood Cats

  Two unlikely partners join forces to solve a murder disguised as suicide and catch a killer ready to strike again.

  Gold Coast psychiatrist Jack Caleb is wealthy, cultured, and gay. When one of his clients is found dead in a locked apartment—apparently from a self-inflicted wound— burned-out Chicago detective John Thinnes doesn’t believe it was suicide. And Caleb is inclined to agree.

  But Thinnes regards a shrink who makes house calls suspicious and starts his murder investigation with the doctor himself. An attack on Caleb that's made to look like an accidental drug overdose starts to change the detective’s mind.

  Soon, the two men find themselves a whirlwind of theft, scandal, and blackmail. Forced into an unlikely partnership, they’ll have to confront not only a killer, but hard truths within themselves that will change them forever.

  Incendiary Designs

  Arson, passion, and religious fanaticism set Chicago ablaze in the deadliest summer on record.

  While jogging through Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Dr. Jack Caleb runs into murder—a mob setting a police car on fire— with the officer still inside. Caleb rescues the man, but later the cop's partner is found stoned to death. Detective John Thinnes is assigned to investigate.

  Evidence points toward members of a charismatic church, but too many of them die in arson fires before the cops can round them up. When arson kills the apparent ring leader, it's too much coincidence. The remaining cop killers plead guilty; the case seems to be closed. But as Chicago heats up in the deadliest summer on record, it becomes clear that a serial arsonist is still at large.

  A physician friend of Caleb's is implicated when some of the fire victims are found to have been drugged. To exonerate the man, Caleb sets a trap for the killer, and Thinnes and Caleb are nearly incinerated when the doctor's trap brings the case to a fiery finish.

  The Feline Friendship

  When a vicious rapist crosses the line into murder, Detective John Thinnes and his prickly new partner draft psychiatrist Jack Caleb to help them track the killer down.

  When a young woman is brutally raped in the posh Lincoln Park neighborhood, Chicago Police detective John Thinnes catches the case—even though Thinnes hates working rapes. Worse yet, he has to deal with a new female detective who has a chip on her shoulder the size of a 12 gauge shotgun.

  A second victim is murdered, and the rapes become "heater cases." What started as a simple investigation, soon twists around earlier, similar crimes. Tempers flare; the detective squad polarizes across the gender line. Dr. Jack Caleb, a psychiatrist and police consultant, is asked to mediate. But Thinnes's sometime-ally finds himself with conflicts of interest occasioned by their friendship and Caleb's own disturbing case load.

  The investigation ranges from Chicago's Lincoln Park to the northern Illinois city of Waukegan. And the explosive climax explores not only the karma of evil but the beginning of a beau
tiful Feline Friendship.

  White Tiger

  In Vietnam, white is the color of death. The 1997 murder of a Vietnamese woman in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood brings Dr. Jack Caleb and Detective John Thinnes together to catch another Vietnamese transplant—a deadly criminal known only as the White Tiger.

  The TV news report of a woman's murder in Uptown leaves psychiatrist Jack Caleb flashing back to Vietnam and sends him running to his own shrink.

  Assigned to investigate, Chicago detectives John Thinnes and Don Franchi find the victim's son, Tien Lee, curiously unmoved by his mother's death. Their preliminary canvass of the dead woman's building and neighborhood reveals that Hue An Lee was well liked and well off, and she had never quarreled with anyone but her "good son."

  Attending the autopsy next morning, Thinnes realizes that he knew the victim when he was stationed in Vietnam—twenty-four years earlier. Thinnes is pulled off the case when an anonymous tipster alleges he'd been intimate enough with Mrs. Lee to have fathered her son. But Thinnes can't let go. And when a schizophrenic man shows up at Mrs. Lee's wake, connecting the deceased to another Vietnam vet and to an unsolved murder in wartime Saigon, Thinnes starts a retrospective investigation of that crime. He solicits Dr. Caleb's help. Tien Lee complicates the case by insisting that the paternity allegation is an insult to his dead mother. He tries to keep Thinnes on the case.

  Dr. Caleb's therapy leads him to relive his own in Vietnam War experiences. When he's brought into the Lee case by a request to help the schizophrenic mourner, Caleb teams up with Thinnes and his partner to discover the identity of the White Tiger and to set a trap for the elusive killer.

  M.I.A.

  This gripping novel of suspense is a tale of violent men and violent passions, of missing friends, of loss and love and discovery.

  The accidental death of Rhiann Fahey’s second husband leaves her paralyzed by grief and has her son Jimmy cutting school and drinking. The widow’s problems are compounded by unwanted advances from her dead husband’s friend. She does her best to cope, returning to work, dealing patiently with Jimmy’s misbehavior, telling Rory Sinter she isn't interested.

  Then a mysterious stranger moves next door. John Devlin offers Rhiann beer and sympathy. He offers Jimmy work.

  When Sinter tries to discredit John, then beat him to death, Rhiann comes to John’s rescue. But she discovers her perfect neighbor isn’t what he’d seemed—which leads her to investigate, and to see John in a different light altogether.

  A beautifully written story with characters who come to life from the first page, M.I.A. shows one more side of Michael Allen Dymmoch’s powerful storytelling ability.

  The Fall

  How far would you go to save your life and your world?

  After a nasty divorce, single mother Joanne Lessing finally has her life together, and she’s made a name for herself as a photographer. Then, while on assignment, she witnesses a hit and run. Property damage only. No big deal, she thinks. So she does the right thing—calls the cops. Joanne is dismayed when FBI agents arrive with the local detective. They admit the hit and run driver was a mob killer fleeing the scene of his latest hit. Joanne is relieved to find she can’t really identify the hit man.

  But when she sees the killer again while on another assignment, she takes his picture and finds her new life and her son’s future threatened. Caught between the Mob and the FBI, she’s on her own...

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