Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  “I deserve that.”

  “Yes. You absolutely do.”

  “Will you sit down and let me tell you—”

  From below, a phone rang and it was such an unexpected sound that a series of electric jolts raced up her spine and turned the skin of her arms to gooseflesh. She didn’t recognize the old-fashioned ring.

  The phone rang again and she knew what it was.

  “Izzy,” Howard said.

  “Stay there,” she shouted and raced away, out of the room and down the stairs to the first floor. Theresa appeared down the hall that lead to the terrace, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

  The phone rang a third time, closer now, just down the hallway beside the kitchen.

  “Land line,” Issabella shouted without slowing until she was down the hall and at the computer desk in what Darren referred to as his “No Party Room.” It sported a full bar, complete with drafting levers for kegs, an immense aquarium sunk into the wall behind the bar, several round tables fit for poker games, and a sound system rigged throughout. He had explained to her soon after she started spending a lot of nights at his place that he’d surrendered to a bachelor’s impulse in designing the room, only to later admit that he simply didn’t know enough people to ever dream of filling the room with partygoers.

  “Thus the ‘No Party’ room,” he’d explained.

  “You could always just turn it into a home office or TV room or something,” she’d told him.

  “But what would I do with all those fish? You can’t have a fish tank like that in an office. They belong somewhere swanky. They’re swanky fish.”

  “How old are you?”

  “What? Why?”

  “You use words like ‘swanky.’ Did you use to wear bell bottoms and a big medallion necklace?”

  “I was not an adult in the seventies, Izzy. Be clear on this.”

  “But you remember them.”

  “From the dim, long-distance fog of childhood. Maybe. Infants can imprint memories, right? Maybe they’re just false memories, like from watching too many Brady Bunch reruns. Never mind. I’m older than you—”

  “No kidding.”

  “—so respect your elders.”

  He’d given her one of his crooked grins and kissed her but now the phone was ringing, so she pushed the happy memory out of her head before she got lost in it.

  She snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “Hello?”

  “Issabella Bright?”

  A woman’s voice, cautious and uncertain.

  A pang of fear ran the length of her, and Issabella sat heavily on one of the bar stools.

  Don’t tell me you found him. Don’t tell me you found him and it’s too late.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “This is Issabella.”

  “And you’re alone?”

  “Yes, I’m alone.”

  “You just lied to me. You don’t want to lie to me, sugar.”

  The voice was more confident now. It was a husky, yet very feminine voice and Issabella knew then that she was talking to the woman who was on the jail surveillance video Agent Schultz had refused to let her see. The woman who had visited her father and poisoned him with cleaning chemicals.

  “Is Darren alive?” she blurted.

  “Are you alone?”

  “No. No I’m not and I’m sorry I said otherwise. Please don’t do anything—”

  “Calm down. Who’s there with you?”

  “A friend named Theresa and my father.”

  “No police?”

  “I swear to you there are no police here. If there’s any way to prove that to you, I’ll do it.”

  “Don’t bother,” the woman snapped, impatience creeping into her voice. “I know who’s there and who isn’t. I’ve been watching you from the start. Do you want to get your boyfriend back in one piece?”

  “You know I do,” she gasped, pushing a sob down and out of her voice. He was alive. She was telling her that he was alive.

  “Good. He needs a shower and a meal. Beyond that, he’s fine. But if you mess this up, you know what happens, right? I don’t have to say it.”

  “I know. I won’t mess up anything.”

  “Here’s what happens. Your friend has a van. Get in that and come to me. She drives. We all go and pick up some money. If that happens the way I want it to, then I get out of the van and you and your friend and Darren drive on off back to your lives. You’re clear on what I’m saying here?”

  “I don’t have any money,” Issabella admitted, and wanted to snatch the words right back out of the air. “I mean, I can get some. I can get whatever you want—”

  “Christ, calm down,” the woman hissed. “I know you don’t have any money. Your boyfriend does and he and I have reached an agreement. You and your friend are along for the ride, get it? Just stop panicking, get the van and get on the road. Darren and I can handle the rest of it.”

  Issabella lurched over the bar and strained down to snatch pen and paper from the assorted junk Darren had stored there.

  “Tell me where,” she said.

  The woman did, and hung up. Issabella stared at the words she’d written on the back of a Chinese takeout menu. The School Book Depository? She’d heard about the abandoned building, as had most people in the Detroit area. A photographer had found a tree growing in one of the rooms, and his pictures had done the rounds online as evidence of Detroit’s collapsed society. It had made local headlines, followed by various officials of the school department offering hurried explanations and apologies for the revelation that literally millions of dollars of school supplies had been abandoned and left to either be looted or decay into mulch.

  She was on her feet and running before she could wonder why Darren’s kidnappers would pick such a wretched, desolate spot to hide out.

  “Theresa!” she shouted. “Get your keys! We’re going to get Darren back!”

  * * *

  Isaac Schultz squinted out the windshield of the sedan, pointed and said, “That’s them.”

  Next to him in the driver’s seat, Probationary Agent Lorenz started the engine and began to creep away from the curb outside the Fort Shelton Tower.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Schultz said.

  “I thought we were following them.”

  “And I thought we established something.”

  Schultz settled back into his seat and stared straight ahead. His exhaustion and frustration had only deepened since watching Issabella race away in the ugliest van in creation. His tie was loose, his suit wrinkled. His jaw was carpeted with stubble and the rims of his eyes were red. He smelled like coffee and sweat.

  Lorenz sighed in resignation.

  “Look, I’ve apologized a hundred times, sir.”

  “What did we establish?”

  “Sir—”

  “What did we—”

  “That I don’t know anything. I drive and don’t do anything else unless you say so.”

  Isaac nodded along, like Lorenz was a schoolboy reciting what he’d learned in class that day.

  “Bingo. Okay, go ahead and pull out. Keep at least two cars between us.”

  Lorenz set his jaw in a tight-lipped frown and followed the beaten, old unicorn van that had emerged from the parking garage under the Fort Shelton. His suit was new, his hands were smooth and one finger sported a big class ring from Harvard.

  Probationary Agent Dermot Lorenz was now Schultz’s personal albatross. The kid had rushed out to rescue Schultz from being stranded at the Gas Light, a flurry of panicked apologies falling out of him all the way back to the field office. Schultz hadn’t spoken a single syllable to him. His mind’s eye had still been filled with the image of the van racing away ahead of a trail of black smoke. He h
ad wanted to verbally reduce the fresh-faced kid to a puddle, but all the way back to his office all he could manage was a dour grimace while his head ran every which way trying to figure out what he should do now that his protective witness had ditched him.

  He was beckoned into the office of the Agent in Charge as soon as he and the kid stepped off the elevator. Stern disapproval. Incredulous disappointment. Lectures on professionalism and protocols. And finally, a last command before Schultz was dismissed and allowed to go try and salvage the case he had campaigned to lead.

  “Take the kid with you. He’s tripping over everyone.”

  “Sir?”

  “The kid. Take him with you. He’s yours. We’re done here, Schultz.”

  On the elevator ride down, Schultz had finally looked at the kid long enough to size him up. Tall, but slight in the shoulders. An earnest expression he must have practiced in the mirror for weeks. Close, conservative haircut. And a big, shiny Harvard ring. The ring clinched it.

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yes.”

  Over the long night that followed, Schultz had been successful in driving that singular point home. Even while they made the miserable journey back and forth from the field office and the hospital, interviewing the staff who had failed to notice Howard Bright pry open a window and leap to freedom, Schultz still found time to stop what they were doing and remind Lorenz that he was to “do nothing” and, by the way, “You don’t know shit.”

  Shultz had hoped drilling the point home would shut Lorenz up. And, for the most part, it had. But over the last hour as they sat outside the Fort Shelton and waited for Issabella Bright to reappear, Lorenz had figured out one advantage to not knowing shit. He was free to ask questions.

  “How do we know they don’t have Howard Bright in that van?” the kid said finally, after they had been following the vehicle for several minutes.

  “We don’t.”

  “So why not just pull them over? If she did help him escape, we can grab them both.”

  “I guess you skipped the probable cause lecture at Quantico.”

  “She escaped from custody.”

  “No.” Schultz sighed and rubbed at his eyes to grind some of the weariness away. “Calling it protective custody doesn’t mean she’s in custody. She wanted to leave and she was free to do it. I think you and her both need to take the same seminar on what being a protected witness means. All she had to do was tell me she was out. Instead she pulls a goofy-ass stunt and throws her phone away...”

  The ongoing trace on Bright’s phone had revealed it to be lying in the grass just off the Lodge Freeway. It had been retrieved in the night, though Schultz had no idea why—the actual phone was worthless to them since they could intercept any call coming to it anyway, no matter where it was.

  “Okay,” Lorenz conceded. “But he’s still a fugitive. So why not just grab him?”

  “And we’re back to probable cause. Congratulations.”

  “Which is situational. We should grab him and make our case in court later.”

  He didn’t say it, but Schultz was half tempted to do just that. It made sense that Howard Bright would have sought out his daughter after his escape. Heck, she might have been waiting to pick him up at the hospital for all Schultz knew. At this point, he wasn’t willing to say he knew what Issabella Bright was capable of. Would she help spring her jailbird father from custody? Maybe, if she thought it was a way to get Darren back in one piece.

  “This is all going to end badly,” he heard himself say, without having consciously planned on saying anything. How tired was he? Tired enough that things were taking on a detached, dream-like quality. He had passed a milestone, sometime in the night, where he had become somehow more alert. He wasn’t nodding off during quiet moments anymore, or stifling gargantuan yawns. This new state of “beyond-exhaustion” was still persisting, leaving him feeling like a third party in his own body, moving numbly through the world.

  “I don’t know,” Lorenz replied, taking a corner slow, the unicorn-van half a block ahead of them. “There’s no way to know if Fletcher’s alive or not. He might be fine.”

  “You should have stopped with ‘I don’t know.’”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Solomon White is a sociopath. Pure, distilled crazy. Whether or not Darren’s still alive, he sure as hell isn’t ‘fine.’”

  Schultz had made certain the fingerprints lifted from the Red Roof Inn were sent to Detective-Sergeant Bill “Stubbs” Weyer of the Dearborn Police Department. Stubbs was fast and dependable. The results had been faxed over early that morning.

  The monster Schultz found himself hunting had a record in Arizona that included two misdemeanor criminal sexual assaults, indecent exposure, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, home invasion and arson.

  The home invasion and arson were from the same event, and had landed Solomon in state prison for four and a half years.

  A call down to the Arizona Department of Corrections got him the psychological evaluation every state prison system conducts during the initial intake process when they’re determining where a new inmate gets housed. The report included the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test, which was a staple in such exams. It tabulated a long series of yes/no questions the prisoner answered and garbled it all together into a psychological profile. Schultz only took the time to note that the test had decided Solomon Kane was suffering from a dissociative personality prone to violence, before flipping ahead to the written report of the psychologist who had interviewed him. Schultz read the report without even a hint of surprise.

  “...subject displays shallow affect...subject’s facial expressions do not match/coincide with his verbal expressions...subject displays a high narcissistic view of self and communicates a grandiose view of himself and his own potential...fails to display any remorse for the violence done in the victim’s residence and in fact professes to be the actual victim of the events that led to his incarceration...his skin appears to be uniformly irritated and raw. This, when coupled with his hairlessness, suggests the existence of obsessive/compulsive grooming, though he refuses to discuss the topic when this interviewer inquires...interview terminated and subject forcibly restrained when he referred to this interviewer as ‘a little slut with a dirty cunt’...recommend the highest level of security available under his instant offense and further recommend subject be evaluated at his permanent site and designated for appropriate prescription schedule...”

  It was good progress, identifying the kidnapper—even if Schultz personally suspected that the information had come too late to benefit Darren Fletcher. Solomon’s face and name was going up on the morning news and in the papers. He was already flagged in every southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio police department as a high priority “Be on the Lookout.”

  Lorenz brought the sedan to a stop, the tires crunching loudly over the gravel curbside. Both men watched as the unicorn van turned right, jounced roughly over a pot hole and rumbled up to a massive derelict of a building standing among lesser derelicts. The van made one more turn and disappeared behind the building.

  “What the heck are they doing here? What is this place?”

  “That’s an abandoned school warehouse,” Schultz answered. “And I don’t know what they could...shit. Shit.”

  He was getting out, caught himself on the seatbelt, furiously yanked around at the clasp, got free and was on his feet outside. Lorenz followed him out and watched Schultz pull the revolver holstered under his left armpit, check it and slip it back into its sheath.

  “You don’t do a damn thing until I do,” Schultz exclaimed, his exhaustion and dishevelment lending his sudden intensity a manic quality. He heard it in his voice and suspected he must look wild and unhinged to Lorenz.

  “I don’t un
derstand,” Lorenz admitted, looking every which way to see what had gotten Schultz so animated.

  “This must be the kill spot,” Schultz explained, shooting a finger at the big, graffiti-stained building and its rows of broken windows. “Our psycho either kept him here or dumped him here. And somehow he made contact with Issabella or the Winkle woman. They’re walking into a nightmare. What other possible reason would they have to hightail it out of that penthouse and come rushing over to an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere? So put away the questions and stay close. You never know, you might get a chance to shoot somebody today. Just do your best to make sure it isn’t me.”

  And he was off, walking at a steady pace toward the depository. He looked back over his shoulder at the young probationary. Lorenz looked in all directions one more time, as if somebody might show up and calmly explain to him that this was all a prank and he was free to return to the office and fetch coffee and not march into abandoned buildings looking for psychopaths.

  Schultz scowled and kept walking.

  * * *

  Theresa refused to leave the shotgun in the van.

  “Izzy, you can forget that right now. Ain’t happening.”

  “I don’t want to risk them hurting him if they see it,” Issabella repeated.

  The two women were standing several feet from where Theresa had parked it behind the depository. Everything around them was weeds, broken sidewalk flags, collapsing chain-link fencing and smaller abandoned buildings. It was one of Detroit’s true “dead” areas, a mile-square emptiness that was as close to being post-apocalyptic as any place could be without having actually experienced an apocalypse.

  Theresa held the shotgun across her chest, and showed no hint of letting it go.

  “We can’t stop them doing what they’re going to do,” she said. “But you and me aren’t stepping foot in a place like that without this shotgun. I’ll drag you back to Darren’s and you can lay around with your old man while I deal with this alone.”

  They had a very short debate about whether or not to force the sleeping Howard Bright down into the van again. In the end, neither of them wanted to bother. As far as Issabella was concerned, Howard Bright could limp off while they were gone and never come back.