CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  He sighed. Inhaled. Tore into another box.

  “What are we looking for?”

  There were two more boxes. One would hold the knife.

  He opened the closest box. Exhaled sharply. Relief sagged his features for a moment.

  He reached inside and drew out a book. “This,” he said.

  It was a planner. The kind of thing used by the classy, the pretentious, people who hated computers, and folks who were combinations of the three. He had always assumed Val belonged to the first group. Now he knew differently.

  “Her Day-Timer?” Listings’ brow furrowed as Evan unclasped the leather cover and began flipping through the pages. He turned to the section that held phone numbers and addresses. “The investigating detectives would’ve looked through that already.”

  “Yup,” said Evan.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Same thing.” His eyes scanned each page quickly. Nothing… nothing… nothing… noth –

  He smiled. “But I know a few things they don’t,” he said. He held up the planner, showing one of the pages to Listings.

  “What am I looking at?” she said.

  He tapped a number at the bottom of the page. There was no name above it. “This is the only number that I don’t recognize in my wife’s book. You wanna guess whose number it is?”

  “The guy she was doinking?”

  “Hardly. She wouldn’t have left that out in plain sight.”

  You sure about that?

  That cold smile.

  “You had to find out sooner or later. Close the door when you leave.”

  “Then who?”

  Evan forced himself back to the present. He couldn’t afford to slip, couldn’t afford to lose control of himself.

  “Ten to one it’s Tuyen’s number.”

  “It was disconnected.”

  He shook his head. “The one on her new hire form was. But this is,” he said, tapping the planner again, “is more recent. And it’s different from the one on the form. I bet it’s her current number.”

  Listings thought about it. Evan could see the wheels turning, could see her looking for a reason that couldn’t be right. It was just a hunch, but it was a good one. Tuyen had listed Val’s number as her secondary contact. Val had some kind of connection to the girl.

  Who was Tuyen?

  What did she have to do with Val, and with the man Evan had shot; the man who should be dead… but wasn’t?

  The man who should be dead….

  That thought sent shudders up and down Evan’s spine. Not just because he didn’t understand what was going on, but because some deep part of him did understand… and was so terrified at the truth that it had hidden deep in the blackest recesses of his own mind.

  Listings nodded. “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Wow.” He pulled out his cell and began to dial the number on the page.

  “Won’t work down here,” said Listings. She gestured around them. “Too much steel and concrete to get a signal.”

  Evan rolled his eyes. “Nothing’s ever easy.”

  “Not if you wanna keep breathing.”

  He started to pocket the planner. “Come on.”

  Listings put a hand on his, stopping his motion. “Chain of custody, White.” She motioned at the planner. “It’s gotta stay here.”

  Evan tore loose. “Screw chain of custody. I want to find this bastard.”

  Listings looked like she was going to either argue with him or shoot him. Evan wasn’t sure which would be worse. But he wouldn’t back down either way. He couldn’t afford to. Muddling up the chain of custody wouldn’t cost him anything at this point, and –

  And a noise stopped the argument/shooting before it began.

  It was a solid thud. Nothing that Evan could identify, but it sounded wrong. Something that didn’t belong here. Something alien and dangerous.

  Listings looked at him and he could see she was thinking the same thing. She raised her eyebrows, a “What was that?” movement he’d seen a thousand times.

  He shrugged. He felt like pulling his sidearm, but that would have been ridiculous.

  The lights started flickering slowly. Less like a loose wire than like a pulse, pounding faster and faster.

  Listings peeked around the corner of the shelves, like she was worried about an attack, then slid into the center aisle

  The lights flickered faster. Then the flickers became arrhythmic: no longer a panicked pulse but the stammering beats of someone in the middle of a cardiac arrest.

  Evan passed Listings. Leading her into the center aisle. Both of them were on their guard, neither sure why.

  The lights went out.

  He heard Listings draw her gun; he did the same. Both of them took cover automatically. Listings darted left and he moved right, each of them tucking in behind one of the huge shelving units on either side of the center aisle.

  The darkness wasn’t complete, but nearly so. The ceiling had been swallowed, and the shelves had become boxy skeletons, looming in this museum of mayhem and cloaked not in flesh and bone but in the proofs of violence.

  “White?” whispered Listings.

  “Where’s the duty officer?” he said. The officer at the front of the evidence area should have been back here, checking to make sure nothing was wrong. Preserving evidentiary integrity, making sure the chain of custody stayed intact.

  “I don’t know, but he’s getting his ass kicked.”

  BAM.

  The sound of something heavy slamming into metal. Then a pause that seemed terribly long, but couldn’t have been more than a second or two.

  WHAM.

  CRASH.

  Evan looked at Listings, barely able to make out the whites of her eyes. It was enough to see she was as confused as he was. What was happening?

  BANG.

  And then Evan knew. He had probably known from the first moment, but couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible.

  SLAM…

  “Move!” He jumped out of his hiding spot, grabbing Listings and pulling her into the center aisle with him. She didn’t resist, her body limp against his. That was good. If she had fought him she would have been hit.

  The shelves – the huge units they’d just been hiding behind, along with who knew how many pounds of boxes – crashed down. Driven over like two tall dominoes.

  The crashing continued, each shelving unit slamming into the one behind it, tossing the contents of the evidence room to the floor in a jumbled mess.

  Evan didn’t know how it could be happening. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t –

  “That woulda killed us,” said Listings. Something was clicking at her side, and he realized it was her gun, rattling against a button on her jeans. She was shaking.

  “I think that was the idea.”

  He looked into the darkness, toward the front of the room. The shelves were piled on top of one another, parallel lines of chaos.

  And something moved. A dark figure. Brown hair, a black coat.

  The killer laughed. The same mad laugh he had laughed in the bar, the same lunatic giggle Evan had heard in the alley. It was a maggot, driving deep into the meat of Evan’s brain. Feeding on him. Growing within him.

  “If at first you don’t succeed,” said the killer.

  And then he ran away. Disappeared into the darkness. His footsteps were silent.

  Listings was after him in a flash. Moving so fast she was barely more than the hint of a shadow, leaping over the scattered contents of the shelves, then into the darkness as well.

  “Listings, wait!”

  She didn’t listen.

  He ran after her. Ran after both of them. Knowing he was not as fleet of foot as his partner, suspecting that neither of them had any hope of catching a man who could do all this.

  (“How do you kill a man who’s already dead?”)

  Evan made it to the front of the evidence room, through the cage that hung wide open. There was no duty officer in sight. No trace
of violence either. The man simply wasn’t there. Something about that fact made Evan’s stomach twist.

  Footsteps drew his attention and he saw Listings pounding up a short flight of stairs. He ran after her. Up the stairs. Panting like he’d been running for hours. Blood drumming thunderously in his ears.

  Through the doorway at the top of the stairs.

  Into a hall. First floor of the building.

  Cops moved through the hall, drones in the bureaucratic hive, trying to get the paperwork done and filed and triple-signed so they could get on to the “real” part of police work. Heads down, just trying to get it done and move on.

  Listings stood in the middle of it all, whirling from side to side. Looking this way, then that.

  No sign of the killer.

  “Dammit!” she shouted.

  She started moving toward one end of the hall, clearly planning on tearing the building down one room at a time. Evan managed to put himself in her path. “Listings,” he said. “Stop. He could have gone anywhere. Or nowhere.”

  Listings jerked, blinking in surprise at his last words. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just….” Evan paused, wondering if he could answer that question.

  Only that’s wrong. You know the answer. You just don’t want to admit it. The reality is too terrifying.

  How do you kill a man who’s already dead?

  How do you?

  “Let’s get somewhere we can make that call,” he said.

  Listings nodded slowly. She wasn’t shaking anymore. Fear had turned again to rage. “I’m gonna kill him. Like, infinity times.”

  Evan tried to smile at her. “Okay, I’ll let the other kids on the playground know.” The sally didn’t cheer her. It didn’t make him feel any better, either, so he started walking toward the other end of the hall. “Come on, Listings.”

  She stood still a moment longer, then followed him. She holstered her sidearm, cursing under her breath. “This is wrong. Everything’s wrong.”

  She knows.

  You know.

  You both just have to admit it.

  Evan didn’t say what he was feeling. Instead he just nodded. “I know,” he said. It was all he could manage.

  It would have to do.

  He felt cold.

  Looped

  Flickers….

  Lines, parallel, then crossing, then running away from one another….

  Bits of an arm. A knife. A face.

  Geist could almost see it.

  It was all there. All there in the tape, in the scene that kept replaying over and over before his eyes and in his mind.

  He couldn’t stop watching it.

  A part of his brain, a part that had fled before the all-encompassing obsession brought by the video, screamed at him to stop. Screamed at him that he didn’t want to know, that he couldn’t know.

  Geist ignored the voice. It sounded like his voice, it was his voice. But he ignored it. He listened instead to the other voices. The ones that whispered to him of murder, of blood, of madness that would last forever and ever and cover him like the softest layer of snow until he died in smiling sleep.

  Murder, blood, madness, death.

  Only murder was a kind of death, wasn’t it? So the beginning and end were the same.

  Just like the tape. It began where it ended, and ending it simply began again. Murder and death. The end and the beginning.

  He realized he was mumbling. “It keeps going. Keeps going, keeps going, keeps going keeps going keepsgoingkeepsgoingkeepsgoing….”

  His voice dissolved into meaningless sounds, shadows of words. The lines and shapes of the monitor broadened, and he felt his nose touch the glass as he leaned in as close as he could. He wanted to be part of the scene. To see what was behind the distortion. To see the truth.

  (Don’t do it! that part of him shrieked. The lie is all that lets us survive!)

  He felt someone behind him. A presence. He could vaguely see a dark shape in his peripheral vision. A swish of black, like a long coat.

  Geist didn’t move away from the screen. Instead he pressed harder. Pressed into it, pushed himself into the monitor, into the screen, into the scene, into the truth. He heard something crackle almost delicately. It was the sound of snow underfoot, the sound of Christmas presents being unwrapped.

  The sound of his nose breaking as he pushed his face further into the screen.

  His nose flattened. He kept pushing. Kept mumbling through the blood that flowed into his mouth.

  “Keepsgoingkeepsgoingkeepsgoing….”

  More cracks, more crinkling snaps. No longer just his nose, but his cheekbones shifting. Shattering. Harder to move his mouth now, but he kept whispering his prayer, his hope and his fear.

  “Keepsgoingkeepsgoing….”

  Then he saw. The distortions disappeared behind a curtain of his own blood. The red mixed with the whites and grays and blacks, and suddenly… he… knew.

  He yanked himself away from the monitor. Pain blazed in his face, pain that had been there for some time now but which he hadn’t noticed. The outline of his face was still on the monitor screen, painted in blood like a gruesome death mask prepared by a society that lived and died against a backdrop of technology.

  He turned around. There was a man behind him. Not too tall, not too short. Just medium. Brown medium hair, a black coat.

  The man Evan was looking for.

  Geist knew it was. Knew it just as he knew what was happening.

  “I know,” he whispered. The words came out mushy. A tooth fell from his mouth. “I know all this.”

  The man – the killer – looked down on him. His eyes blazed with insanity. Then the mad candle flickers in his eyes died for a moment, and there was only pity.

  Somehow that was worse.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the killer. “Knowing never helped anyone.”

  Geist tried to scream as the killer raised a knife. He couldn’t. His mouth wasn’t working right.

  The knife fell. Geist felt it enter him. Felt it tear through him, tearing what he understood apart in white-hot flashes of pain.

  He didn’t shy away from it. The pain was a blessing, because it hid what he had realized. The pain smothered reality, it obscured the visions of what he had seen behind the distortions. The agony was delight, because in it he found oblivion.

  And oblivion was sweet.

  Eclipsed

  They were just around the corner from the station building: far enough to be able to talk freely, but close enough that Listings felt like she had a bit of a tether to reality. That was important. Because right now everything had gone so far sideways she felt like she was trying to breakdance on the side of a cliff.

  That they were outside the station was weird in itself: with only one major exception she could think of, Evan had always been a stickler for the rules. So he should have been insisting they report what happened in the evidence room, and stick around to deal with the mountain of paperwork that would have to be filled out and filed.

  Instead, he had the planner he had lifted from the case file – another major rule violation – and was flipping through it again. No sign he intended to go back to the station building and deal with clean-up, no sign he cared about anything but that planner.

  Listings paced. “We are so boned. When they find the evidence room like that, we are so boned.” Evan didn’t seem to hear her. “You hear me, White?”

  Still no trace of a response. She knocked the planner out of his hands. It landed in a puddle.

  Now Evan noticed her. “Hey!”

  “You do realize our careers are toilet-bound, right?”

  Evan was in her face, closer than he’d ever gotten except when they were making out or making love. “I DON’T CARE!”

  The outburst caught her utterly by surprise, and it seemed to do the same to him. He just stared at her, and she realized she had a fist halfway cocked. No shock there: she’d always been one to start a fight fa
ster than she could think about whether it was a good idea or not.

  The shock was that Evan looked like he might actually punch her back.

  He didn’t, though. He stepped back instead, and picked up the planner. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just don’t know what’s happening, Listings.”

  “Bad mojo,” she said.

  He looked up at her so sharply she heard his neck pop. “What?”

  “Something my gramma used to say.” She shrugged. “Funny old coot.”

  Evan looked away, turning the pages on the planner again, but this time moving oh-so-slowly. Using the movement to control the pace of the conversation, to get things back under control. If anyone else had tried that crap, Listings would have pounced all over him. But Evan got away with it. He got away with a lot with her.

  “Listings,” he finally said, “if you want to go, that’s fine. I’ll tell Geist the evidence room was my doing. That you were nowhere near it. I’ll take the hit for it.”

  She considered it. Only for a half-second, but for that half-second it was a tempting thought. Then she shook her head. “Sure. You’d end up crapping into a bag when he was done tearing your ass off. Not to mention he’d fire you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Listings peered at Evan. “You mean it.” He nodded. She thought about walking away. A bit longer this time: maybe three-quarters of a second. “I’m not gonna abandon my partner. Not even if he was terrible in the sack. Which you aren’t.”

  Evan grinned, and she felt like the sun was shining again after a night that had lasted far too long.

  And, being, her, she couldn’t let that be. She had to squash it. “But I need to know: what’s going on, White? You’re usually Mr. Rules, so what’s got you so spooked that you’re willing to let go of a promising career in the ass-crack of the nation?” Then, being her, she had to make it harder on herself than on anyone. “Is it Val? Still?”

  Evan’s smile disappeared. Not like the sun behind a cloud, but like a solar eclipse that no one could predict. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  When he said, “Yes,” her heart felt like someone drove over it with a big rig. The follow-up words almost disappeared in the aftermath. It took her a moment to realize he had stopped flipping the pages of the planner and was looking at her intensely.