SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “Come into my office, Cassandra.”

  I let him lead me inside, and as soon as the door was shut the noise outside erupted again. Hamilton circled me like some sort of animal, sizing me up, and I spun around on the spot, following his eyes.

  “Shouldn’t you be in a hospital bed?” he asked. His voice was one of genuine concern, not scorn like Rourke would have—she would love for me to be out of commission in a hospital bed for weeks.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Cassandra, I saw the injuries as you came out of that house. You looked like a glass porcupine. LeBron got away with a nasty bump to the head, it seems, but you were really bleeding.”

  I sighed and slowly started to lift my T-shirt. Hamilton, despite all his experience, suddenly got a little flustered.

  “What? What are you doing?”

  “Showing you my back.” I lifted the T-shirt just enough so that he could see my smooth, unblemished back. He couldn’t resist, and I felt his hand run over the contours of my spine. I thrust the T-shirt down.

  “How?”

  “It wasn’t as bad as it first looked. I signed myself out this morning, and I’m ready to get back on the case.”

  “Cassandra, I don’t know,” he started, stroking his chin and no doubt thinking about my back. He’d never seen so much of my skin before, and to him that must have been worth a few moments’ consultation. I turned and looked him dead in the eye.

  “Come on, you can’t take the case away from me now—you know we’re close. He wouldn’t have attacked me at all if he wasn’t worried about us catching him.”

  “He might have,” Hamilton argued, but I could tell it was a fleeting argument.

  “No, he hasn’t physically harmed a woman this whole time, not a single one of them. He may be out for revenge, but he’s not out to get more than the people he thinks are involved.”

  Hamilton nodded, conceding the point, and patted me on my left shoulder. I winced a little, and he yanked at the collar of my T-shirt to take a look at the almost-healed wound on my shoulder.

  “This one is still sore?” he asked. The tissue was that very fine pearly pink.

  “Yes it’s sore, but unless you’re worried about my batting average, it will be fine enough for the purpose of catching one teenage kid.”

  “All right,” Hamilton conceded. “I’ll call Rourke and get her up here. We’ll have another briefing.”

  I nodded. Although I loathed to bring Rourke back up, we had promised to cooperate. He got on the phone and I went into the briefing/break room, trying to scrounge up some coffee and maybe something to eat. I found some coffee brewed in a pot and poured myself a cup, but there was no food, just an empty box of what looked like donuts. I sighed; I would even have taken a plain one, if they had just left one for me. I took a sip of the coffee and pulled a face just as Hamilton joined me; then I gagged and pushed the coffee aside. It was absolutely awful—it tasted like some sort of rust monster had gone and died in the coffee machine.

  “This stuff is awful. Whoever made it should be shot, or worse, made to drink it.” I wished I had my toothbrush so I could clean my tongue.

  Hamilton chuckled. “Yeah, it’s hard to get good coffee around here.”

  “You’ve got how many officers out there—can’t one of them make a Starbucks run?” Hamilton took the seat next to me and laid his arms back along the line of my chair and the one next to him.

  “Well, one of them might if you asked, but I don’t have your obvious”—he looked at my chest as he finished his sentence—“charms.” I placed two fingers under his chin and lifted his face.

  “I’m up here, Hamilton.”

  He grinned at me. I found that his grin was very schoolboyish at times. Here was a man who had never had any real trouble getting a woman to go home with him for a serious night of passion that concluded with breakfast in the morning and never seeing each other again. Not only did his routine not fool me, he knew it didn’t, and sometimes I suspected it bothered him that he had no effect on me. Like Mayor Mayla couldn’t get into my mind, Hamilton couldn’t get into the place he wanted to either, and I knew he wanted to. He’d mentioned it, once or twice.

  Rourke marched in through the door, and we both turned to give her an identical look. She stopped dead when she saw me, and her eyes widened.

  “That’s not possible, I saw what...”

  “Yeah yeah, I was a porcupine or something like that, but I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.”

  “I just don’t believe it.” Rourke stunned was something to see. It was like the Incredible Hulk in the cartoons when someone like Rick or Betty started talking to him. She understood the words coming out of my mouth, but the doubt was so obvious. Benjamin was stuck in the doorway behind her because she just wasn’t moving.

  “Do I have to take my top up to show you as well?”

  “Yes please,” Benjamin said, leering from behind. Rourke snapped to enough to shake her head and stood aside so Benjamin had a clear view as I flipped him the bird. Benjamin was the reason God created the middle finger; I was sure of it. He may not like me on a personal level, but he was still quite happy to leer at me if the opportunity arose. He was such a pig he should have been made of bacon.

  Rourke took a seat on the other side of the room, Benjamin slid in next to her, and LeBron stood in the doorway behind her. I got up and hugged him; I don’t care what either of them thought. He didn’t hug me back until he realized I was initiating a step up in our friendship: I was making us friends who hug. I stepped back from him but kept my hands on his arms.

  “Hey, how’s the head?” I asked, checking to see if there was a large bump that throbbed like you get in the cartoons all the time. There was no such bump, so I was sure he had to be fine.

  “It’s a little bruised. I was too busy making notes of the bullshit he was telling me to notice him pick up that big-ass heavy vase.” I smiled at him and ruffled his hair. He winced a little, more out of embarrassment than from pain.

  “What about you? Are you really okay? I mean, when Carlson slapped me awake you were...well, you looked bad.”

  “I’m okay. Doctors patched me up and sent me back out.” I turned back to the room. “Can someone fill me in on what I missed?” I took a seat, reached for the coffee I’d poured, then remembered the foul taste and retracted my hand. I leaned closer to Hamilton.

  “Seriously, send someone to Starbucks, you have the power.”

  Hamilton chuckled and shook his head.

  “I’ll see what I can do when it comes to the lunch run, okay? So you’ll have to wait an hour.”

  “Fine, fine, just keep me distracted.”

  Rourke coughed, interrupting our little whispered conversation, and claimed my attention.

  “As you should already know, Petrovich is in the kid and the kid is in Gwynne Bank’s body at the moment.”

  “What’s the kid’s name?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.

  “Oliver Warner,” Rourke said. “And he’s a world-class perv. I had to break up a fight between him and Gwynne in Chloe because he wouldn’t stop looking down her top or copping a feel.”

  “The last straw,” Benjamin laughed, “was when she caught him in the ladies’ room trying to take her bra off. She went ballistic.” I could imagine—I would have decked the kid myself on principle. Teenage boys like pretty much three things: computer games, junk food, and naked women—usually in magazines. I wondered why his mother had let him out of her sight while he was stuck in that body.

  “Where are they now?”

  “We’ve shipped all those in the wrong bodies to a safe house for the moment. Keep them out of trouble and out of our hair while we try to end this,” Rourke said, adjusting her ponytail to make sure it was nice and tight.

  “So he’s in the kid—Oli
ver, you said. Where is he heading to next?”

  “That’s where we’re ahead of him,” Benjamin said. “When we got to our address, we found it empty; landlord said the tenant had died of an overdose a couple of months ago. So he’s dead and the other one, we’ve got him in custody at the moment—for his own protection, of course.”

  “Has he said anything?” I was deeply interested in this guy.

  “Nothing yet,” Hamilton said. “We picked him up this morning, but this one is different. He lived in a high-class penthouse. He seems to be higher up the chain than any of the others; he’s got to be the next target.”

  “Do you think we could be looking at Mr. Big’s right-hand man?”

  “It’s possible,” Rourke said, “but if he is, he’s also his most loyal flunky, and he won’t crack easily.” I nodded. There was no doubt in my mind that this guy was going to be tough. He hadn’t made it to number two by being soft or by spreading secrets about who he worked for. If there was one thing we could use against him, it would be his deep self-preservation instinct.

  “We also pulled in Ivan Petrovich’s lawyer. We got that Mr. Silverman you said you went to see to identify him as the man who bought the necklace, so we have him for aiding and abetting a fugitive of the law, but that won’t keep him in jail long. He’s a lawyer, after all—if anyone knows how to get around a charge, it’s him. But we’re holding him for the full forty-eight hours and maybe longer, if the paperwork happens to get mislaid for a little while,” Rourke said, and the smile on her face could only be described as a certain evil satisfaction. It was good to get his lawyer behind bars for a little while—it meant Petrovich had nowhere to go for help, and he was trapped in a sixteen-year-old body, without a driving license. He was hampered enough to make him easier to find.

  “So what are our options?” I asked, leaning forward so that my elbows were on my knees.

  “Can you track him with magic?”

  “I could try, but I don’t know how a different essence inside the body will affect the spell. It might just lead you to the safe house.”

  “Aww, can the big bad witch not do the spell?” Benjamin’s tone was mocking, and it made me narrow my eyes at him.

  “The big bad witch never got to go to the school and learn if the finding spell tracks the body or the essence, but she does know how to turn obnoxious men into rats.”

  Benjamin quivered a little, trying to pretend he wasn’t scared of what I could do. He knew very well that if it came to a fight between us and I lost my temper and used magic, he would be toast—and that could be quite literally. He had a fear of being turned into bread. I smiled a little to myself.

  “What do you think, Cassandra?” I turned to look at Hamilton, who was inviting me to share my thoughts, so I slowly got them back on topic.

  “Let me talk to the one we have in custody. I might be able to get him to talk.”

  “We can’t get him to talk,” Hamilton said, “and we’ve tried all our techniques.”

  “Yes, but as you said, I have charms—some that are not as obvious but just as good.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I stood in the room with the one-way glass, munching on a chicken-and-lettuce sandwich, drinking some decent coffee and staring at the guy in the interview room. He looked very clean cut for a criminal: neatly starched blue shirt with one button open at the top, cufflinks through the button holes of the cuffs and pressed black slacks. He looked like a casual executive for some sort of futuristic conglomerate. I was sizing him up, watching him as he looked around the room, tapping his fingers on the table patiently. He’d finished the coffee Hamilton had brought him a little over ten minutes ago.

  He had salt-and-pepper hair and looked to be in his late forties, meaning he was prematurely graying. His eyes were a deep chocolate brown, intense, intelligent, and aware that something was going on around him that he had no control over. He hadn’t called a lawyer yet; he was the sort of man who didn’t call in the expert until he had exhausted his own knowledge of the law or unless he felt threatened. He fiddled with his cufflinks every few minutes, a nervous tick I noted.

  Hamilton opened the door, coming into the room behind me. He placed his hand on my shoulder, giving it a little rub while I washed the last of my sandwich down with the last of my coffee.

  “You ready to take a crack at him?”

  “Almost, just letting him sweat a bit. He’s a little nervous now, and I think I can use that.”

  Hamilton watched him as he fiddled with the cufflinks and nodded his head just slightly, agreeing that the guy looked a little more nervous that he had been.

  “Well, I’ve had a crack at him as good cop and Rourke as bad cop. What’s left?”

  I picked up the file I had with me and tapped it gently against my side. I took deep breaths to steady myself.

  “Scary-as-mother-effing-hell cop. I’m ready,” I said, checking the contents of the file to make sure I had gathered up everything I wanted. Hamilton opened the door and held it for me.

  “I’ll be right here if you need me—just tap the glass. Are you sure you don’t want an earpiece?”

  “No thanks. I’m not positive I can do this with just my voice in my head, let alone yours.”

  “I could whisper sweet nothings to keep you calm,” he said with a radiant smile that I just rolled my eyes in response to. I rounded the door frame to the door into the interview room. My hand rested on the doorknob, and I took another deep breath, straightening my shoulders. I walked into the room with confidence.

  He looked me up and down and a smile came over his face. My appearance seemed to please him, and his shoulders relaxed a little. A lot of people didn’t find me intimidating till I started putting it down. I took the seat across from him.

  “Hello, my name is Cassandra.”

  “Kensington Powell, but you can call me Ken.”

  “All right, Ken. I need your help. I need you to tell me what the connection is between you and Tony Dietrich, Charles Banks, and Jackson Warner.”

  He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his cheek against his palm; he had a lazy smile on his face.

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Well, your name was in Charles Banks’s little black book along with Jackson Warner’s, and right now there’s only one difference between you and them.”

  “What’s that?” he inquired, playing along with me.

  “You’re the only one still breathing.”

  Kensington swallowed hard, trying to keep the emotion out of his face, but I could see the fear behind his eyes. I opened up the little folder and took out a picture of Tony Dietrich, tied to his coffee table, the blood swimming around him, the tiny cuts on his chest standing out against his paling skin. I slammed it down on the desk in front of him. He looked at the picture. I watched him gag a little.

  “Tony Dietrich was tortured for an hour before he was killed, stabbed through the heart.”

  I pulled out the second photo, of Charles Banks’s death. I pushed it across the table so that it was next to the other one, not obscuring any of the other’s details.

  “Charles Banks, tortured and stabbed in the heart too.” I pulled out the photo of Jackson Warner, slumped in the shower, the blood dripping down his chest and arm.

  “Now we disturbed him at Jackson Warner’s, so we’d have thought his death would be quicker than the others, but he bled to death very, very slowly.”

  In truth, Jackson Warner had died relatively quickly—he must have given up information right away, hoping to save his wife and son. Or maybe because we’d arrived, Petrovich had just killed him to make sure his end result was achieved before he dealt with us. But Kensington Powell didn’t need to know that. I was trying to make him afraid enough to crack. His eyes darted from picture to picture. Hamilton an
d Rourke had only used mug shots to try to get him to give up his connection to our victims. I thought that if he saw clearly what had happened to them, what could happen to him, he might be more inclined to cooperate.

  “What has this got to do with me?” he asked, but his voice was weak, strained. I was getting somewhere; he was fiddling with his cufflinks more intensely, concentrating on Dietrich’s and Banks’s pictures. I pulled out the second to last photo. It was a copy of the blood-spattered black address book that we’d found at Banks’s scene, open to the page clearly showing his address. He swallowed hard.

  “This is what it has to do with you. This was found at our second murder. Your address is clearly written here—it’s how we found you. Our killer saw this and”—I tapped the address of Jackson Warner—“Jackson Warner is dead. Amilo Hozes is already dead, overdose, two months ago. That just leaves you as a target.”

  Kensington looked from side to side, up at the ceiling, anywhere but at the pictures. I slammed my hand down, and his gaze was drawn to the photos again. I could almost watch the knot tie itself in his stomach.

  “What do you want me to say? Why is this guy after me?” Here was the crux of the situation.

  “Does nothing in these two pictures look familiar to you? The broken coffee table, the living room floor, the stab wound to the heart?”

  He licked his lips nervously. I pulled out the last photo and placed it on top of the others. The crime scene photo from the murder of Nikki Lewis. His body stiffened and he looked to the door.

  “I would like my lawyer now.”

  I lifted my hand, making a motion with my fingers. I held up three of them, asking Hamilton to make the call to the lawyer a long one.

  “My associate is calling your lawyer right now, but we’re going to continue talking while we wait.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  “That’s okay, you’ve just got to listen. You see Nikki here, before she was married, was Nikki Petrovich. Her old man is a convicted felon, imprisoned because he took out the three men who caused his wife to commit suicide. This was his second wife, mind you. Now imagine how hell-bent he would be to find those who in any way were responsible for the death of his daughter and the disappearance of his granddaughter.” I leaned forward, resting my face on my hands.