Chain Lynx (The Lynx Series Book 3)

by Fiona Quinn

  He said Julio. This must be Brody.

  “These were men in police uniforms?” Orloff asked.

  “State. I didn’t break a law. They aren’t supposed to break my nose!” Brody held something up in his hand. I paused the tape.

  “What has he got there, Gater?” I asked.

  “I can’t see what you’re seeing,” Gater said.

  “He’s showing Orloff and Mullhainey something shiny.”

  Gater leaned in toward the screen. “He pulled off one of the assailants’ badges.”

  “Good for him. Are they tracking it down?” I asked.

  “They have the name. Officer Saunders. He was on duty last night. They cain’t make radio contact with him or his partner. They got an all-points out for them.”

  “Two thugs could have hurt the officers and taken their clothes,” I said. “But that’s a pretty far stretch. They’d have to have the right size team. Take down two state cops? Brazen, dangerous, and stupid. Nope, I’m betting on rogue officers.”

  “That’s the chatter, ma’am,” Gater said.

  I pressed play on the video, and Orloff was animated again.

  “No, sir. They aren’t supposed to hurt you,” Orloff said. “We’re not going to hurt you. We’re going to get you some help.”

  The man’s legs went out from under him. He crumpled to his knees with the one good arm knuckle-down on the road for support. The badge scuttled out in front of him. His injured arm now hung at an improbable angle, a bone tenting his skin in the wrong place. My stomach did a flip. Gah.

  “You need medical help. Your arm is broken.” Orloff took a step forward.

  “Please. Please don’t hurt me.” The guy pulled his shoulder toward his face like a shield. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to go to jail. All I did was pick up the code and put it into the computer. I did nothing else. If you put me in jail, CQ2 will kill me, too.”

  “Why would they kill you?” Orloff asked.

  “Why did they kill Maria? Why did they kill Julio? Same night. Same time. Two different prisons. They wanted to show how organized they are, how exact they are.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” This time it was Mullhainey.

  “Not only that, but the guy from the van. Hector.” The injured man panted and swayed from his barely upright position. I thought he was going to pass out from the shock and pain of his injuries. Now he was rambling somewhat incoherently. I strained to make out his words.

  “Soap down his throat. Who does that? He wasn’t even on CQ2 territory, he was up north. Everyone who touches. . .shit. Why did I do this? The money wasn’t even that good. Noble has no power up north. Who got to Hector? Nowhere to hide. Big. This is big. If you arrest me, they’ll kill me, too. I probably won’t make it ‘til morning.”

  “Sir, you need medical attention. We want to take you to the hospital. We have an ambulance en route. We’re going to get you help,” Mullhainey said.

  “No. No hospital. They’ll get me. You don’t understand. They’re everywhere. They run everything. There is nowhere I can go that is safe for me. They didn’t kill me yet because they think I have the codes. If I had all the codes, why would I go see Julio? They have to think I’m something I’m not, otherwise they wouldn’t have killed Julio. They must be convinced that it was me, not him. But it was him. I swear it was him. I don’t have the codes. I was too low on the totem pole. Julio never even talked to me. Not before prison and not even after, when I went in to memorize the numbers. I did reproduction. I don’t do software. I never even met Julio before he was in prison. I swear. I know nothing more than the phone number I get each week.”

  I could see Orloff shaking his head. None of this meant anything to him. It all sounded like the ravings of a man struck in the head with a nightstick too many times. Hell, I had a clue what all this meant, and it still sounded like gibberish to me.

  “You said that it was police officers who beat you?” Orloff asked, again.

  “Two of them in my apartment,” Brody coughed and blood splattered his shirt.

  “How did you get away from them and onto the street?” Orloff asked.

  “I shot them. They beat me back toward my bedroom. I had a gun hidden there.” The guy was panting his words out like a steam engine trying to gain velocity. “I shot them. They’re dead. Everyone who touches this is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”

  Then Brody arched back and took a long gasp of air into his lungs. “They know I know. They know I’ve seen him alive. When I saw him standing there, I freaked the hell out. I left Miami and hid here – I thought I’d be safe.”

  Orloff took a step closer and crouched down like Brody. “Who? Who’s alive?”

  Thirty-Four

  “Sylanos.” Brody’s shouts echoed off the apartment buildings. Lights snapped on in the windows. The man gave a soft laugh. “And now that I’ve told you, you’re dead, too.” Then he did a face plant.

  An ambulance pulled in at the crossroad. Orloff and Mullhainey crouch-walked cautiously over and patted down the injured man. They gave an all-clear sign to the rescue crew, who packaged him up, cuffed him to the gurney, and rolled him away.

  “Gater, that’s our man. Where’s Brody now?” I buzzed with excitement. Alive. He saw Sylanos alive.

  “Gone,” Gater said.

  “Gone?” My eyebrows shot straight up.

  “Rescue took him to the hospital. Emergency got him stabilized and put a cast on his arm. When the nurse went in for the routine vitals check, he was gone. The handcuff was still dangling from the bed rail. Opened with a key.”

  “They got to him.” I put my hands on my head and let my breath leave my lungs in a whoosh.

  “Looks like it. Sorry,” Gater said.

  “How’d you get this tape?”

  “Marine friend of mine turned cop. He works for Orlando PD. He heard the chatter and went to investigate. He’s the one who got hold of the tape for me. Good thing he got it when he did. It went blank right afterward.”

  “No kidding. Wow.” Someone else must have been listening to the chatter, too. “Brody said Sylanos is alive. He’s seen him. And he said that Jim Noble ordered CQ2 to kill Maria and Julio. Orloff and Mullhainey are in danger.”

  “I took care of it,” Gater said. “I sent a copy of the film to everyone’s inbox. If you work for the city of Orlando, your copy already popped up in your e-mail.”

  “You’re a pretty smart guy, Gater Aid. Was anyone able to trace back to Brody’s apartment?”

  “Which apartment?” Gater asked.

  “More than one?” Deep asked.

  “Yeah, he had an apartment in Miami. We went in, but it was abandoned, so I headed to Orlando.”

  “Can I have the address?”

  “I’ll text it to you. So Brody has a walk-up here in Orlando. Looks like there were three of them living together. The other two were out partying and missed the show. Came home to yellow police tape.” Gater took another bite from his sandwich. I waited for him to swallow.

  “What kind of police tape? Who’s claiming jurisdiction?”

  “Orlando City. One of Brody’s neighbors called 911. Shots fired. Police showed up. Blood smears dragged from the apartment, down the stairs, and over the sidewalk. Spatter patterns and bullet holes on the bedroom walls. Definitely two people hit. Dead? We’re not sure. Disappeared? Yup. And only one witness willing to say they saw or heard anything, and they did that on the 1-800 witness tip lines.”

  “And said what?” I was holding either side of the computer screen in a death grip. I wished I could use it as a portal and be on scene in Orlando.

  “Four men hauled two police officers to a van. State uniforms on the downed officers.”

  “What about the original caller. Did he see anything?”

  “The caller decided by that point that what he had heard was a car backfiring and not really gunfire, like he had first supposed.”

  “I see.” I lowered myself back down in my chair.

  �
��Where do we go from here, ma’am?” Gater asked.

  “We’re not quite back to square one. We are back on the Brody hunt, though. What’s on your docket? Can you stay down in Orlando, in case something pops up in the next day or so?”

  “I was scheduled to relieve Deep tomorrow. I have meetings at the end of the week in Washington. Iniquus needs the Apache back then.”

  I was plaiting my hair into a braid, holding a rubber band between my teeth. “Oh. I want to learn to fly an Apache!”

  “I’m sure Command can arrange for that when you’re back from the dead. We don’t need Omega rocket launchers aimed at you, too. Expensive all around.”

  My lips made a hard line. “Roger that.” Though Omega was supposed to treat me like a fragile egg now, they weren’t really known for using a delicate hand. They were more your smash up, derby kind of guys. “Gentle” to them probably meant I could still breathe without a ventilator.

  Deep leaned over my shoulder so the computer camera would pick up his face. “I don’t need a break, man. You stay there until Headquarters needs you.”

  “Wilco. I’m back on the scent.” Gater popped the last bite of his sub in his mouth and reached out to cut our connection.

  That was a lot to take in. A lot to process. I swiveled my seat around to face Deep, sitting rigidly against the hard back. Deep stayed quiet while I thought. I leaned forward. “Review.”

  “He doesn’t have the codes,” Deep said.

  “He saw Sylanos and said ‘now that I told you, you’re dead, too.’ I would suppose that to mean that Brody saw Sylanos since Sylanos’s ‘death’, because why else would it matter? I wish I knew for sure that sentence was accurate. But because it’s supporting something I want to believe, I need to be careful about assumptions, and wait for proof.”

  “Let’s draw out possible scenarios.” Deep pushed up and went to the whiteboard.

  “The one that seems the most likely from what I heard,” I said, “is that Brody worked for the Sylanos cartel. Brody said he was a reproduction guy; he didn’t do software.”

  “That means he was part of the pirating side of the Sylanos shipping triangle,” Deep said.

  “That would make sense. Julio didn’t know Brody’s name. Julio knew him as B. Henry Covington from his visitation roster. Julio wouldn’t have known who Brody was at the work site if Brody was a worker bee. Maria could have met Brody in the warehouse when she went there to see Julio.”

  Deep drew a box, labeled it warehouse, and put Julio, Brody, and Maria’s names up there.

  “Let’s assume that Brody worked for Sylanos, and that Maria hired him to go get the codes from Julio,” I said.

  Deep drew a prison, put Julio in the box, and Brody on the outside.

  “Okay,” I said. It was good to see this going up on the board. It felt more cohesive to me, and less like a flock of thought birds roosting in my head. “Julio’s safety depended on the codes going into the computer each Sunday afternoon. And Julio was the hen sitting on the golden egg. Maria didn’t know where all of their money was hidden. She needed to keep him alive. After Maria sent my prison video and the ransom note, she could no longer pick up the codes. Brody goes each week, and each week he gets his $500.00 payment.”

  “Nice little paycheck for an hour’s work.” Deep drew a dollar sign over Brody.

  “No kidding. Okay, next we know that Brody was aware of Julio’s death. That was part of the news cycle, so that’s not surprising.”

  Deep picked up a red marker, and put an X over Julio’s name. “And Brody knew about Maria,” he said, and X’ed through Maria’s name.

  “Brody keeps going to his normal work - say Monday through Friday – because while $500 is nice, it doesn’t pay the bills. It’s plausible that he didn’t know that Sylanos did pirating. Well, just for fun, let’s make him innocent in this scenario. Brody goes to seemingly legitimate work on the weekdays, and on weekends, he goes up to Nelson to play his Maria/Julio role. He might think it’s slightly weird, but hey, it’s 500 bucks. No harm, right? He’d do the job.”

  “Wouldn’t people know?” Deep asked.

  “Maria might have told him that if he said anything, then the gig was over. I don’t know. He must have realized this part was nefarious. I’m sure he wouldn’t be telling everyone. Maybe he just told the wrong someone.”

  “The connection was made. They knew where to find him.” Deep reached up to circle Brody’s name and draw a big fat question mark over it.

  “The attack came on Saturday night.” I tapped my pen against my jaw. “It makes sense, and yet it doesn’t make sense. Someone knew there were codes. The men wearing the uniforms - and let’s assume they really were officers for the moment - asked for the codes. They might even know they needed them by Sunday. They hurt Brody. It was torture-hurting him, though. They weren’t trying to kill him. Yet.”

  “How do you figure?” Deep asked.

  “If they wanted him dead, it would go something like this: officers break down a door on a suspect. They have their service weapons drawn. They shoot the guy because he was armed and threatening. Done,” I said. I laced my fingers behind my back, and started pacing. I was a kinesthetic thinker, and movement helped me sift through the debris.

  “They needed the codes to keep the information from leaking.” Deep followed me with his gaze. “Do you think they would have shot him after he gave them up?”

  “I guess that depended on what he gave up when. He didn’t have anything real to give them. If he convinced them of that, he’d be dead. I guess he could have made up a string of random numbers and bought himself a few hours. Of course, Brody probably had no idea that the codes were meaningless since the CPA’s office burned down. He might not even know what would happen if the codes didn’t go in,” I said.

  I paced some more, then stood looking at the board. “So torture — injuries to the eye. Broken nose. When that didn’t work, a step up in pain, strikes to the leg — bad enough that it made him stagger. Broken arm. These weren’t professional techniques. Too much noise. Too much show. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the two guys in uniform really were police and not criminally professional.”

  Deep drew two stick figures lying on the ground with tongues hanging out, blood puddles under them, and X’s for eyes.

  “We don’t know they’re dead,” I said.

  “Why officers?” Deep erased the X’s and drew googly eyes instead.

  “Whoever ordered them in would know that an officer in his uniform can do what a citizen cannot. It would make breaking down the door okay. Cops are already there, no reason to call 911. A scuffle and yelling? Expected. They could even drag Brody out and away, and it would be all in the line of duty.”

  “Brody won. He shot them.” Deep added some spurting blood coming out of the stick figures’ chest wounds.

  “Score one for the little man. Then he runs. He thinks Jim Noble called the hit on Maria and Julio via CQ2. How could he know? Why would he have any contact with Jim Noble or know about his gang ties? That’s really baffling.” I pulled out a chair and sat down, only to pop right back up again for more pacing.

  “Brody probably thought Noble ordered the beating, which makes sense,” Deep said. “Noble would know the state officers, and if he was, in fact, criminally minded he would have a few bad eggs in his pocket.” Deep drew lines connecting Noble, Brody, Maria, and Julio. And wrote CQ2 on the lines between Noble, Maria and Julio. The white board was starting to look as jumbled and unintelligible as the whole crime sequence.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Hector. Brody knew Hector’s name. How weird is that? And he knew that Hector was dead. His death didn’t make media. Hector was from DC; before that he was El Primo in New York. Write these questions down for me, Deep. One: how did Maria meet Hector to hire him? Two: how did Brody know him by name? Three: why was Brody keeping tabs on Hector?”

  Deep scribbled the words onto the corner of the board. “Al
l good questions,” he said.

  Thirty-Five

  Tomorrow, I’d be moving. I was glad to be headed back to Headquarters, though I knew I’d be under lock and key. I loved Striker’s bay house, but I was beginning to feel like a butterfly who had done her metamorphosis, and was ready to chew her way free of the cocoon so she could fly. I was waiting for Laura and had been wasting time this morning, looking through the old pictures that Biji had sent to me for my birthday gift, laughing at myself in my yellow Playtex gloves. Deep was right; I was a weird kid.

  I sat on the floor in my room with the album open in my lap and shock on my face. I had made my way to the very last page. . .a newspaper clipping from the night of the fire.

  Emotions. So many emotions from that night. Confusing. Conflicting.

  The photographer snapped the picture in front of the Safeway across the street from my apartment building. I was in the left hand corner of the picture, dressed in my flannel p.j.s with the two boxes I saved from my apartment sitting next to my frozen bare feet. My eyes locked onto Angel’s. It was the very second that we fell in love. He had his hands under my elbows, holding me steady as I swayed from the jolt of this new feeling. Angel. That was truly a lifetime ago. I was innocent then.

  In the center of the picture, flames climbed the walls of the three-story building. Fire fell from the sky along the street, where the hook and ladder trucks and EMTs had parked. I lost my way of life that night. Almost everything I owned. My tightly knit community. . .

  I recognized one of my fellow rescue volunteers checking on old Mr. Grady. He had a heart attack that night.

  But, the image that caused my shock was a car on the right-hand side of the photo, obscured by the distance. My mind could be playing tricks. . . I squinted over the page. I could swear that that was Tom Matsy climbing into the front seat of a sedan, and that the man holding open the door was. . . god yes, I swear it was Travis Wilson. The guy who had stalked and attacked me. He was there at the fire. . .with Matsy. My brain stuttered.