Phineas Troutt Series - Three Thriller Novels (Dead On My Feet #1, Dying Breath #2, Everybody Dies #3)

by J. A. Konrath

Semi-aware… everything spinning, moments strung together and together…

  Pull out the dart. Pull out my insides through the hole.

  Deflating.

  Can’t trust past or present.

  Not dead.

  Drugged.

  Time stretches and slows.

  Fainting, waking, remembering, forgetting, shivering.

  Hallucinating.

  Familiar.

  This feeling is familiar.

  PCP.

  Fear. Sweating.

  Dark. Trapped.

  Get up. Move. Scream.

  Reach.

  The walls are cold.

  Neck is buzzing. On my knees. Pull imaginary covers around me.

  My hands are cold. Can’t wake up.

  So I’ll sleep.

  JACK

  Benedict came back into my office with two cups of coffee in his hands.

  “Find your Mr. Coffee?” I asked.

  “Vending machine.”

  I debated thanking him, since the coffee was so bad, but let manners and my need for caffeine override my displeasure at the taste.

  “Thanks.”

  The coffee was grittier than usual. After my first sip I wanted to floss all the little grains of whatever out of my teeth. I could only hope they were coffee grounds.

  “I know,” Herb said. “Tastes like sand.”

  “Sand would be an improvement.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “You mean during the five minutes you were gone?”

  “Don’t be rude. I brought you coffee.”

  “That’s why I’m being rude.”

  Herb made a you think you’re funny but you’re not face.

  “Actually,” I said, “I did. Gomar Rentals called me back about the former employee. The guy who rented out the truck to the killers. I’ve got a phone number.”

  I put my desk phone on speaker, and dialed.

  The line picked up on the third ring.

  “Mr. Dalt?” That was me talking.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Lieutenant Daniels of the Chicago Police Department. Would it be possible to see you later today?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s about your former job at Gomar rentals.”

  “I don’t work there no more.”

  “We are aware of that, Mr. Dalt.”

  “Huh?”

  “We know that you don’t work there anymore.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “To ask you a few questions about a truck you rented out. The one that was never returned.”

  “Got a new job now. At the Amaco.”

  “We’d like to come to your home.”

  “Amaco wouldn’t like no cops coming to hassle me.”

  “We’ll meet you at your home, Mr. Dalt.”

  “I ain’t gonna be home after four.”

  “Then we’ll be there before four.”

  “I don’t work for Gomar anymore. I work at the Amaco.”

  “We know, Mr. Dalt.”

  “I quit there. Boss was always hassling me. Don’t like getting hassled.”

  “We’re not going to hassle you, Mr. Dalt.”

  “You want to come over and talk to me?”

  “Yes we do.”

  “I ain’t gonna be home after four.”

  “We’ll be there before then, Mr. Dalt.”

  “It’s pronounced dolt.”

  No kidding.

  “See you at your home before four, Mr. Dalt,” I said.

  “You know where I live?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dalt. We’re the police.”

  “Just come before four.”

  He hung up.

  “He’s gonna be fun to talk to,” Herb said.

  “As long as we get there before four. You hear anything from Cluck?”

  Cluck was the nickname everyone knew Wallace O‘Clusky, who was heading the Mauler task force. The term task force made it sound like there were twenty SWAT commandos in full body armor on 24 hour standby, ready to parachute in and snipe all hostiles. The Mayor liked to assign task forces to major cases, because then it sounded like everything possible was being done.

  In actuality, task force work was the worst. It was boring desk jockeying and phone jockeying, and if you were lucky the monotony was broken up with almost entirely fruitless door-to-door questioning. So far the task force had been assigned a plethora of menial tasks. Calling motels and searching for the fake names used to check in, checking all the factories and shops in town who operated metal lathes, to try and match the swarf we found in the truck’s tires, and calling all police precincts in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri to check if they found any similar victims in motels.

  Rather than an elite fighting force of twenty, our task force consisted of seven very tired and very overworked individuals, either fresh out of the academy, on restricted duty, almost retired, or being reprimanded for some minor indiscretion.

  If I found out who took the damn Mr. Coffee, that person would see task force duty for a year.

  “Cluck,” he answered, then coughed.

  “Daniels. Got anything for me?”

  “Naw. We’ve been gardening here.”

  Gardening was cute task force jargon. They were turning up shit.

  “How many of the motels have you gone through?”

  “All of them. No check-ins or reservations from anyone named Doug Stephenson or Doug Jackson in the future, or going back six months.”

  “How about the third name?”

  Cluck coughed. “There’s a third name? Why don’t people tell me this shit?”

  “Chuck Gardiner.”

  Cluck coughed again, but I realized his cough was a laugh.

  “Let me in on the joke,” I said.

  “Well Doug Stephenson and Doug Jackson, they’re pretty common. I thought it was a coincidence. But now we got Chuck Gardiner on the list. Next name will probably be Bobby Hull.”

  Bobby Hull. Why was that familiar?

  “Hockey players,” Herb said. “The names are all Blackhawks?”

  “Hey, there, Benedict.” He coughed again. “Yeah, Chicago Blackhawks. Apparently our perps are sports fans.”

  “You know what you need to do, Cluck.”

  “Yeah. Gotta visit every motel in the city with pictures of every Blackhawks team going back to 1926 and ask if they’ve seen any of these men.”

  Cluck found himself so funny that he was lost to a coughing fit for ten seconds. When he settled down, he said, “Seriously, Lieutenant. We’re talking over a thousand guys.”

  “See if you can narrow it down. Maybe those three have something in common.”

  “Goalies,” he said. “Jackson, Gardiner and Stephenson were all goalies.”

  “How many goalies have there been?”

  “I dunno. Hundred? A few more?”

  “Make a list. We’ll send it to the motels.”

  “You expect some schmo working at a motel for six bucks an hour is gonna go through a hundred names.”

  Putting the outdated word schmo aside, he had a point.

  “There’s some sort of Cook County Crime Watch reward program. Anyone with tips that lead to a felony conviction gets a thousand bucks.”

  “I’ll get a list together, Loot.” He began coughing again.

  “How’s the health?” I asked, as if I couldn’t hear for myself.

  “Wanna know the worst thing about emphysema? It ain’t the hacking, or getting winded walking up stairs. It’s that I miss cigarettes.”

  “Sorry for your loss, Cluck.”

  “I know. Thank God for cigars.”

  I hung up. Cluck was one of the old timers who wasn’t pressured to retire because we were always low on manpower. I think when he joined the force they were still using flintlock pistols.

  “Need more coffee?” Herb asked.

  That was a tough question. Yes, I needed the caffeine, and no, I didn’t need any more gri
t in my teeth.

  “Okay. Grab a filter so we can strain out the hard bits.”

  “When you say it like that it sounds disgusting.”

  “Do you want to drink the hard bits?”

  “I’ll find a filter.”

  Benedict got up for more coffee and I flipped open the autopsy report. The body was of a post-pubescent young woman, age 15 to 20. Date of death was difficult to determine, due to her body being frozen. Cause of death was likely due to exsanguination; blood loss from over twenty-three stab wounds. Phil Blasky theorized the weapon used was a filet knife. The kind fishermen use.

  No semen found in rectum, vaginal cavity, mouth, or stomach. But evidence of tearing in the vagina and rectum. She’d been raped, probably with objects.

  I flipped through the companion report from the lab boys, and it wasn’t too encouraging. No skin under her fingernails. No foreign hair, pubic or otherwise, found in or on the body. Chemical burns on 40% of her body, caused by a household oven cleaner; they were working on which brand.

  As with the other victims, the teeth had been chiseled out.

  Of the several dozen latent prints found in the truck, there had yet to be a computer match on any one of them.

  The girl had been taped to the bed of the truck with duct tape. Analysis to whether or not it came from the same roll as the others was inconclusive. The ends of the tape were cut with a razor blade or sharp knife, rather than scissors. No prints found on the tape.

  Closer examination of the rental truck, including a fine tooth combing of the chassis and positioning of such items as small papers, dirt, dust, and blood trails in the cab and bed, indicated the truck had been towed from the rear, as I’d guessed.

  No papers or rental agreement was found in the truck.

  Forensic and crime scene evidence was great when a case came to trial, but it didn’t do much in the way of helping us catch the guy. We had three unidentified dead girls. Maybe they were runaways, maybe kidnappings, maybe disappearances, but we had no way of figuring out their names. And if we never got the guy, three sets of parents would never know what happened to their daughters.

  I didn’t have children, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having one go missing, and then never know her fate.

  I was about to play the video of the latest scene when Benedict came back with two more steaming cups of sludge. He set one on my desk.

  “It might be rust,” he said, cleaning in between two teeth with a fingernail. “Vending machine has been here as long as I have. Never saw anyone clean it.”

  “That would explain that metallic, oxidized taste,” I said, drinking it anyway.

  Human beings rule the planet. And caffeine rules us. All hail Lord Caffeine.

  Herb wiped whatever was on his finger onto his tie. I started the crime scene video and the phone rang. I paused.

  “Daniels.”

  “Sergeant Michaels, Property Crimes. Got to break our meeting later. Can it wait till tomorrow or can I help you out now?”

  “I just had a few questions,” I said, “shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Hit me.” He had a voice that was squeaky and low at the same time. Like a tape of Mickey Mouse, played at half speed.

  “Ever hear of an outfit taking cars by towing them away?”

  “Sure. A lot of the bigger rings operate like that. Steal a few tow trucks, repaint ’em, and you got yourself a car theft fleet.”

  “Are any in Chicago right now?”

  “We’ve gotten two dozen reports in the last few months.”

  “Leads?”

  “Yeah, two. Jack and shit.”

  Whatever Bains had hoped to accomplish by this proposed meeting remained to be seen. I suppose it was just the political cover-your-ass thing again. ‘Yes, Mr. Mayor, we have a lead connected to a stolen truck, and right now we’re working with our grand theft auto team.’

  “How often do you bust a ring like this?” I asked.

  “We get all of them, eventually. Takes time. There are so many damn cars stolen every day, and so few recovered, we can’t tell if it’s big outfits taking them, kids out for joyrides, solo professionals, or people just plain forgetting where they parked; all my department does is try to keep all the information coming in organized.”

  “You don’t have anyone undercover in a chop-shop?”

  “Sure we do. Hundreds of undercover agents. We also have several thousand officers disguised as spare tires, hiding out in car trunks and waiting to be stolen.”

  His helium voice punctuated his sarcasm nicely.

  “My balls don’t need to be busted, Michaels. I’m one of the good guys.”

  “Sorry, Loot. Got so much pressure on my shoulders I should strap on a yoke. This is the Motel Mauler case?”

  “Yeah. A tow truck stole a rental truck with a dead girl in the back, then dumped it in Mount Cisco. We think they took it to a factory first. Or a metal shop. Someplace with swarf on the floor, because it was embedded in the tires.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar, but I’ll spread the word. When I hear something, I’ll call. Sorry I canceled the meeting, but someone just stole the State Treasurer’s Nissan. Gotta Crisco my lips and kiss some ass.”

  “Good luck,” I told him, and we mutually broke the connection.

  So much for help from Property Crimes.

  I briefly outlined the conversation for Benedict, and then we started watching the video again, and the phone rang. Benedict went to pause the vid, but I told him to let it roll.

  “Daniels.”

  “It’s Hajek, CST. We lifted six good latents off of McGlade’s Vette.”

  The Crime Scene Team had come through. “Nice work. Send them over.”

  “I ran them already. Got a hit. They belong to an ex-con named Dill Remir. Did two stretches for GTA. Address in Englewood.”

  “Parole?”

  “Time served.” He read off the addy. “Also, we got more from the rental truck. Dirt and dead leaves.”

  “Can any of it be traced?”

  “I called a botanist friend to identify the foliage. And if we got a soil sample from another scene, I could match it. Plus, we found something else.”

  He paused, wanting me to ask. So I did. “What did you find?”

  “Blood.”

  Only in my line of work was discovering blood good news. “From the perp?”

  “Not likely. This came from the back. Didn’t match the victim.”

  I considered it. “She’s not the first one to die in that truck.”

  “That’s my guess. There’s also duct tape residue where we didn’t find duct tape.”

  “Good work. Keep me in the loop.”

  I relayed it all to Herb.

  “Want to wait for the warrant or talk to him now?” he asked, referring to Remir.

  Cutting a deal took time. Mr. Remir was entitled to legal representation, and there was a metric shit-ton of paperwork involved.

  “We haven’t pressed charges yet, so he doesn’t need to lawyer-up to get them dropped. We could drop by, ask nicely. Save us a few hours. Maybe a few days.”

  “What if he runs?”

  “Haven’t you heard? We have a task force. We can put a few uniforms on it, watch his place.”

  Herb stood up and tossed out his paper cup. “Good. Let’s stop for some real coffee on the way.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And maybe a bite.” He patted his belly. “My food baby is crying for hot dogs.”

  HARRY

  When I cabbed it back to my condo, the dick condo manager was waiting for me in the lobby.

  “Mr. McGlade, I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve talked to the condo association, and there was a unanimous vote that no tenant is allowed to own a horse.”

  “What horse?”

  He sighed. “Mr. McGlade, must we go through this charade?”

  He was the kind of dick who pronounced it sha-rod. What a dick.

  “Look…” I tried to recall hi
s name, failed, and it was too late to ask, “buddy, when you have some sort of proof I have a horse, I’d be happy to comply. I have a designer dog, one of those golden chiweenie maltipoos, and unless someone is complaining about the barking, get off my back.”

  I tried to walk around him, but he did that trick where he stepped in front of me.

  “Mr. McGlade—”

  “Let me explain how the burden of proof works,” I said, talking over him. “If I said I have a leprechaun, it’s not your job to prove I don’t have one. It’s up to me to prove it. Ergo, I don’t have to prove to you that I don’t own a horse. You need to produce the proof. Got it?”

  “What do leprechauns have to do with—”

  “Who’s saying I have a horse, me or you?”

  “I am.”

  “So you’re the one who needs to prove it.”

  “Why don’t you just prove that you have a dog?”

  “Because I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. Make sense?”

  While he stood there looking confused I hopped onto the elevator and pressed the button. Once again, my mental acrobatics and quick thinking saved me from a sticky situation. I wondered if that snooty IQ club, Mensa, had a king, and if I should apply for the position.

  When the elevator stopped, I walked to my condo door with pep in my step, buoyed by the satisfaction of my own intellectual abilities. The uniqueness of my keen mind was so fine-tuned that it bordered on metaphysical, because as soon as I raised my key to my lock, I knew something was off.

  It didn’t feel right.

  I pressed my ear to my door, listening, and could make out the faint sounds of television.

  Had I left my TV on?

  I didn’t think so.

  So there were two possibilities. The first, someone was in my home and had turned on the television. The second, Rover the horse had developed parrot-like abilities, and was mimicking the sound of a television.

  The former seemed likelier. That latter, much cooler.

  Either way, I’d best be careful.

  I eased the key into my lock and turned.

  The key didn’t move.

  I jiggled it, harder.

  It didn’t work.

  Had that dick condo manager changed my locks? Or was something more sinister at play?

  I took several steps back, ready to give the knob a shift kick, and just as I was lifting my foot the door opened.