“Right. You think you’re getting relief from a severe allergic reaction and you inject yourself with another allergen. Thanks.” Drexel hung up and leaned against the wall.
He now knew how. Kara killed the Bull. She had set up everything beforehand. Spiked the Bull’s smoothie mix with spirulina. Prepped the epi pen. She took a space of time and ran to the condo, burned the phrase in the desk. She may have even done that beforehand. She knew his routine. She killed her lover. Her father’s partner in crime. And she had sent a message doing it. Did she blame the Bull for the corruption of her father? Her father died in prison so the Bull should die too? Did it matter?
He shoved the phone into his pocket and walked back into Sam’s apartment. He heard, “I’ve got to go.” He walked into the kitchen as Sam put the phone down. She looked at Drexel with surprise.
“Who was that?”
She put her hands around the mug in front of her.
“Was that Kara?”
She looked at him. Looked at the phone. She nodded.
Chapter 28
At his apartment, Drexel stood outside the door of the office, which was in reality a room of painful memories. Painful because they were joyous. The room had been a makeshift memorial, a way to not deal with Zora’s death, and a haunting presence.
He drained the whiskey from the glass and put his hand to the door knob. When he had walked the beat and his first years as a detective, he had done this many times as he returned home late in the night or early in the morning. A gentle grip, a slow turn, and the door would open silently. She had been awake more often than not. He would whisper, “Hello,” and undress as quietly as possible, and slip into bed beside her. Then sleep. A version of sleep he had lost when he lost her.
He opened the door and stood at the entrance. He stood and told himself it was just a room. But a box of photo albums and scrapbooks were in the corner of the closet. Her books—poetry, mysteries—sat on shelves in stacks. Her photos and paintings he had not yet sorted through leaned against the wall next to the bed. Her iPhone with all her music sat in the desk drawer. He walked over to the desk, where a framed picture of Zora and Drexel at some restaurant he could not remember was taken. It had been summer, for they were both tanned, Zora more so. He opened the drawers until he found the iPhone and its cable. He walked back to the front room and plugged it into the wall. After it booted up, he laid on the couch and looked through it. She kept a lot of photos on the phone, and he scrolled through some of them. The last in her photo roll were a set of pictures from a furniture store of three different lamps. She had texted them to him asking which one he liked. The lamp with a clear base with chrome metal rising up the center to a simple shade with tiny, almost hidden fleur-de-lis cast its light in the room.
Hart jumped on the couch, crawled over him, and jumped on to the back, where he fell asleep.
Drexel switched to the music. Their musical tastes had overlapped, but she had a wider range, a more innate sense and joy in music than he did. For him, music was background or highlights to the task of living. For her, it was a soundtrack, like a constant reference of her life to a song or set of songs. He flipped through the songs and saw one he remembered her playing a lot. A cover of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” by Scala and Kolacny Brothers. He tapped play. The song set to a piano and a women’s choir.
Drexel felt the tears running down the side of his face. Music for her had been a connection between the internal self and external world. And here he was making that connection as well, with her included. Drexel had long abandoned any faith. Others may speak of the omnipresence of God which grounded them, offered them a path. Zora had been and still was that for Drexel. It was the closest thing to believing in the divine he ever attained.
* * *
Drexel woke and it was dark. He had slept through the afternoon. Hart was at his feet on the couch. His phone was vibrating on the coffee table. Lily. He answered. “Hey.”
“Where are you? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there in a bit. Really sorry,” said Drexel.
“What’s wrong?” She had picked up something in his voice, in his response, something that she had developed over years of living with him.
“I—I—not now. Later. I’ll tell you.” He paused. “Promise.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
“I know you will. How’s he doing?”
“Sleeping, but better.”
“Good. I’ve got to do some things, but I’ll be there.”
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
Drexel ended the call and tossed the phone on the coffee table. He splashed water on his face and then looked outside. The worst of the snowing must have ended, though the drifts were sizable. He guessed two feet or so, made all the worst by the wind. The city would be running tomorrow, but lots of people would stay home. Shovel themselves out. Worse than the snow, bitter cold was already reaching in from the arctic. The kind of cold the weather people use grave tones to speak about how fast skin freezes. A warning ignored by a couple of million the next morning who instead bundled themselves up in parkas, scarves, and boots and defied the cold as if it had a personal grudge against them. An almost cartoonish diorama were it not for the grimaces of discomfort.
Drexel put on his insulated brown boots, wool coat, and a light grey knit cap. He could not find his scarf, so he walked out onto the sidewalk, trudging through the snow. It was cold. Very cold. He put his head down against the wind. He needed to get to the station. To look over the evidence, the board, look up Eugenia Xenakis. To find out where he had gone wrong. Or to prove he had been blinded, had fallen into the trap Ton warned him about.
Once on the L, he texted Ton—for he could not bear to talk to him, to admit failure at that point in time—for the credit card numbers he had given to Kara helping her flee. Drexel hoped Ton had something. It might be the only way to find her.
Drexel leaned his head against the window pane. He and a dozen other people huddled in the L car, which dipped below the city well before the Kennedy, though he imagined a string of cars stranded in depths of snow, plows working to clear a lane. Streets barely passable if that.
At the station, the night shift was in, but Naresh and Doggett had agreed to cover for two of that shift’s detectives. Homicides still occurred in blizzards, but the number dropped with the increasing snowfall or plummeting temperatures. A gallows-humor logic that resonated with the likes of Doggett, who—his back to Drexel—was mimicking a man. “Damned cold. The snow’s too much to go out and kill a man. I can wait to kill Lawrence when the flowers bloom again.” Doggett’s head arched back and he laughed heartily.
Naresh noticed Drexel come in and gestured with his chin for Doggett’s awareness.
The senior detective turned and dropped the humor. “How’s Ryan?”
Drexel pulled off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair. “He’ll make it. Nothing too serious.” He sat down and clicked the mouse to get the computer to wake up.
Naresh said, “Is it true the perp doped him?”
“That he did.” Drexel’s phone vibrated with a text message. “But he’ll be okay.”
Doggett nodded his head. “Good.”
Drexel asked, “You two the only ones here right now?”
“Yeah,” said Naresh, who turned back to his desk.
Drexel’s computer requested his login credentials. “Do you know if Victor got the perp who had my brother.”
Naresh looked back at Doggett, who gave him a look.
“What guys?”
Doggett scratched his nose. “Yeah. Victor and several unis got there. But no Jerry.”
“A girl?”
“No. Nothing. Took a while to get over there. They must have gotten out by the time
Victor got there.”
“Well, we got my brother out.”
Doggett nodded and walked back to his desk.
Drexel entered his credentials. While the computer logged on, he pulled out his phone. A message from Ton. Two credit card numbers. He texted back, “Thanks.”
When the computer came on, Drexel searched on “Eugenia Xenakis.” A series of results appeared. He clicked on one of the top headlines: “Girl Codes Game at School.” The article, from the school’s website, described how the sophomore Kara had worked in the computer lab. A group of the students participated in an extracurricular initiative sponsored by one of the teachers—an alternative for those not interested in athletics, drama, or music. Kara designed a simple program in the class allowing her to search multiple websites for price comparisons. A form of those websites that compared airfares or hotel rates. Impressive for a young girl.
Other articles dealt with her as a member of the graduating class. She was accepted to Northwestern University, graduated, and then Eugenia disappeared from the record. Around that time she must have stolen the identity. Kara had been planning this for years. Revenge. But why? Did she blame the Bull for her father’s participation in the murder?
Drexel pulled up the old case file and reviewed it. It seemed straightforward enough. And maybe that was it. Her father died in prison and the Bull gets out and becomes rich and successful. Give those circumstances to anyone when they are young and a desire for revenge might develop. Only a few would act on that desire. Drexel had seen his share of callous murders. The husband who sat in his lounge chair with his wife’s blood and brain matter on him. He drank the beer she refused to bring him and held the bloody Louisville Slugger. The bragging of a teenage Latin King after Drexel and Doggett showed up at their corner about the killing of a Latin Stones. Cuffing the kid as he spouted about how his rival deserved the twenty-two bullet just behind the left ear that bounced around the skull. A mother making tea for the police and pouring in porcelain mugs as they questioned her about why she drowned her three-year old son in the bathtub. “He wouldn’t brush his teeth,” she had said.
But these were not thought-out murders planned over years. They did not involve the perp instigating a relationship with the victim. They had all been, in the end, snap decisions carried out over minutes or seconds, albeit embedded in emotions and contexts acted out over years.
The Bull’s murder was unlike anything Drexel had ever encountered. Yet he could not reconcile this with the woman who had committed it. He shook his head. He needed to find her. He hoped she had been using the card Ton gave her, so he began filling out the warrant to access that information from the credit card company.
His phone buzzed. Drexel picked it up expecting to see a text from Ton. Instead, a message from Kara. “2nite. Terrace @ Trump. Meet me. 11.”
Drexel looked at his watch. Quarter after ten. He would just make it with this snow. He grabbed his coat and hat and put them on as he walked out of the building into the cold and gusts of wind that made it seem like it was snowing all over again.
Chapter 29
The Terrace at Trump was an outdoor dining and seating area on the sixteenth floor. Reserving a table cost one hundred dollars without any food or drink, but by all accounts—Sobieski’s tales of sitting with politicians and ranking Chicago PD leadership—the views were spectacular. The Chicago River stretching into Lake Michigan, the Wrigley and Tribune Tower buildings, and the Loop.
Sixteen, the restaurant, closed at ten. Drexel tested the door, which opened. She was here already. He stepped into the dining room with it two-story high ceilings, large creamy columns, and a centrally placed, crystal chandelier. The staff had placed all the chairs upside down on top of the tables. Chicago gleamed beyond the curved window bay of the dining room. From inside looking out, he was able to admire the view of the city and snow that lifted up and danced around before re-falling. He had expected Kara to be in the restaurant, but she was not in the dining room. He pulled out his Glock and held it with both hands, pointed toward the floor. He looked around the dining room, stooping down to look below the tables, but she was not there. He moved across the dining room toward the Terrace door. All the furniture had been pulled in for the winter.
Outside, Kara was standing, bundled in a long, white puffy winter coat. Her Burberry scarf’s tail whipped up and down beside her as the wind caught it and let it loose. She stood a couple of yards from the glass and steel railing, facing Lake Michigan at the corner of the Terrace where the Chicago River side of the building turned north.
Drexel tested the door. It opened and he stepped onto the terrace. He had told no one about Kara’s text or that he was here. Why he had not told anyone—not even Ton or Victor—he had not yet answered himself. She was the killer, the person he was duty-bound to arrest. He had almost slept with her. And he had defended Kara’s innocence, and even then standing in the cold, snow lashing his face, he could sense himself wanting to continue to protect her. Did he need to hear it from her, that she was the killer? Was that what was necessary? And if so was he going to arrest her? These questions swirled around in his head and gut and heart because he could not understand himself at the moment. He could not forget the kiss. And he could not forget the guilt, the sense of betrayal.
“Kara,” but the wind carried his voice off the Terrace and into air above the city. He raised his voice almost to a shout. “Kara.”
She straightened up. Around the edges of her hood, her breathe rose thickly before being flung into Chicago’s lights. She turned and raised a semi-automatic pistol, leveled at Drexel’s chest.
“Kara?” He said, raising his pistol up halfway between her and the ground, still pointing to the ground, but visible, ready. Behind her, Drexel could see the Chicago River lit by lights of the city, streetlights, and walkway lights up the Link Bridge and then the darkness of Lake Michigan. The river’s glassy stillness added to the sublime quiet of the fresh snow and hunkered down city.
“I’m so sorry.” Kara’s hand did not shake.
He had no idea if she knew how to use it, but at this distance, not as much skill was needed. “Put it down. No need for this.”
She stepped backward. “I’m afraid there is.”
“We know who you are. I know.” He raised his left hand and gestured downward. A fresh gust of wind lifted snow off the terrace, flattened one side of his jeans against his legs. The gust was so strong it made it hard to keep his eyes open.
She stepped back, the gun still leveled at Drexel’s chest. “I’m so sorry.” She looked behind her.
Drexel knelt down, setting his pistol on the terrace in an inch of snow. “Sorry about what?”
When she looked back at him, she was surprised, but she threw the look away. She wiped a tear from her face. “I’ve been Kara Brandt so long now I am Kara Brandt, no matter what you think. But my name is Eugenia Xenakis.”
“I know. Carter was your father.”
“My papa.” She paused. “Hal was responsible for my papa’s death. It was his fault for getting him into trouble to begin with.”
“So this was revenge?”
She nodded her head and took another step back, and he could see tears were coming down both sides of her face. “Yes, it was revenge, but it was more than that. It was vindication. It was setting the world right. I—I got the life I should have. At least for a little bit.” She stepped back another step and was now on the edge. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, but I did.”
“Let’s talk about this.”
She thrust the pistol’s barrel toward Drexel. “I know how to use this. Stop there.”
“What does ‘Once said no unsaying’ mean?”
She wiped the tears away from her face. “It’s what papa used to say. No matter what you said, you can’t take it back. Good or bad. Something he heard from his dad.”
“Why don’t
you put the pistol down—.” He calculated his ability to get to her and wrest the pistol away before she could shoot. He would slip in the snow after the first few steps. He set the pistol on the floor.
“Drexel, stop. I wanted to get revenge for papa. No one knows the story. They only know bits of it, fragments that don’t add up to the real picture. I wanted a form of justice. The truth.” She looked straight at Drexel, her eyes were teary but a look of desperation pervaded the gaze. “When they robbed that store, they were after TVs, stereos. Shit to sell on the streets. They didn’t know the owner was there, and he pulled a gun on them. Hal shot him, but when they were arrested, when they were interrogated, papa was loyal and refused to talk, refused to give the police anything. But Hal? Hal ratted papa out. Said it was his idea to rob the place. His gun. He pulled the trigger. Hal lied about everything. Got a reduced sentence. When papa realized what was happening, he tried to tell the police. But they had their story. And they took it.”
Drexel held out his hand. “I understand. Anybody would understand.”
“No.” She wiped tears from her eyes while keeping the pistol steady. “No. When I met Hal, I intended to bring him down. Get him to marry me. Divorce me and then I get a big settlement. A way to get restitution, to get some measure of what my family lost. I was going to get the money and leave, destroy the Bull and his career. Betray him and let him know the daughter of his partner was the one who did it.” She shook her head. “But then. Then one night, we were talking, like couples are supposed to do. He said he had a big regret. He confessed everything. How he betrayed papa. How he had rigged the election. How he wanted to be a good man but never thought he could be. Then I knew what I had to do.”
“Of course. Kara—”
“His confession hardened me. I realized then. Realized more clearly than I’ve ever known anything that bringing him down was not enough. I could bring a balance to the world in only one way. Everything should’ve worked out. Except for the trash. Just a death by allergic reaction. And then I couldn’t help myself. I had to let him know it was me.”
The Shattered Bull (Drexel Pierce Book 1) Page 24
