The Abbey (a full-length suspense thriller)

by Chris Culver

  “Do I want to know what’s in there?” she asked.

  I licked my lips before answering.

  “Probably not,” I said. “Would you like me to tell you anyway?”

  She looked down at her shoes.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what, then,” I said. “I’ll hang on to it, and you think about it. If you want to know more, you can give me a call.”

  Mrs. Cutting closed her eyes, and for a moment, it looked as if she were going to start crying. She covered her mouth with the flat of her palm and eventually nodded to me before stepping into the hallway. Once she was gone, I reached into the safe and pulled out the handgun. That gun would have been useless in court, but it told me something important. Robbie Cutting knew someone was trying to hurt him. I wished he had told us.

  I turned the gun around and stared down its sights. The piece was old and not particularly well cared for, and I could tell right away that Robbie hadn’t fired it. Its barrel and chamber were so far out of alignment that any rounds put through it would have stuck in the chamber and blown up like a pipe bomb. I swallowed and dropped the revolver into my evidence collection kit beside some brown paper bags. I reached back into the safe for the Styrofoam cube wedged in back.

  The cube was maybe five inches on a side and held together by brown packing tape. I cut the tape on one side with a box cutter from my kit and tilted the package open like a jewelry box. Someone had bored six circular slots into the Styrofoam, five of which were occupied by stoppered test tubes of what looked like blood. The sixth slot was empty. I stared at it for a moment. Like the gun, the cube was no longer admissible in court since I wasn’t on a case, but I could use it. I dropped it in my evidence kit and shut the safe’s door.

  I grabbed my box and started to leave but stopped in the doorway and said a short prayer. Robbie was eighteen years old when he died. It was a waste. On my way out, I met Mrs. Cutting in the living room and thanked her for her time. Her movements were stilted, but she put her arms around my neck in an awkward attempt at a hug. I patted her back. She looked as if she were going to say something when I pulled back, but I think she realized mid–thought that there wasn’t much to say.

  Chapter 10

  I put my evidence kit in my trunk and pulled up to the gate in front of the Cutting’s house. I looked left and right. The street was empty except for a gray Ford Taurus on the side of the road to my left. That figures. The Cuttings lived in an old covenant community with its own private security force, garbage collectors, and snowplows. IMPD was called in for violent crimes and other felonies, but the neighborhood’s private security took care of noise complaints and other minor incidents. They also kept the riffraff under watch.

  I pulled onto the street and glanced in my rear–view mirror. As expected, the Taurus followed about a hundred yards behind me. I could see two men inside. They were a good distance away, but from what I could tell, they looked too young to be retired from the force. They were probably off–duty officers picking up a few bucks for a few hours of easy work. It was a common arrangement. I ignored them and drove through the neighborhood without incident. They followed me for a moment when I turned out, but I lost them in traffic shortly after that, presumably when they turned around to find some other brown person to harass.

  Since it was my night to make dinner, I stopped by the grocery on my way home and picked up a rotisserie chicken, coleslaw, and mustard potato salad. The sun was setting on my way out of the store, but the blacktop radiated heat from earlier in the day. I climbed into my cruiser and glanced in the rear–view mirror as I put my packages on the passenger seat. There was a gray Ford Taurus with two men inside a few aisles away. It could have been a coincidence, but I doubted it. They were still following me.

  I left the parking lot and took a circuitous route home, including a stop at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, to see if my tail would follow. I lost track of them occasionally, but I eventually managed to spot them again each time. Whoever they were, they were pretty good at being evasive. If I hadn’t gotten lucky at the grocery store and spotted their vehicle, I wouldn’t have even known they were there. About twenty minutes later, I pulled into my driveway. Thankfully, Hannah and Megan were still out, so at least I didn’t have to worry about them for the moment. The Taurus drove past as I opened my door, its occupants never looking in my direction.

  I took the food I had purchased to the house and put it in the refrigerator. My street had long, sloping hills and ran straight for about two miles in each direction, allowing multiple vantage points of my house. If the Taurus’s occupants were smart, they’d pull off at a church up the street. The building would afford easy cover, and with cars parking near it constantly, an anonymous Taurus wouldn’t stick out like it would elsewhere in the neighborhood.

  I checked to make sure I had a full clip in my firearm before going to my backyard. My department didn’t have a written protocol about what to do in situations like that, but if they did, I imagine the suggested first step would be to call backup. There were at least two problems with that, though. If cars started piling up in my driveway, my tail would know something was up. They’d split before we could find out who they were or who sent them. The second problem was that my call would go over a police radio, which I assumed my pursuers were bright enough to have. If I wanted information rather than to scare them off, I was on my own.

  The sky was streaked with oranges and reds by the time I stepped onto my back lawn, and the evening insect symphony was beginning to warm up. It looked like it was going to be a nice night. The skies were clear, and the temperature was relatively balmy. I’d prefer overcast for what I planned to do, but early evening glare would work for me, too.

  I walked to my cedar fence and used the center support beam as a step. I heaved myself over the top and into the alley behind my house. I was too old to be jumping over fences, though. I rolled my ankle on the landing, but I was okay. I straightened and rotated my foot. It hurt, but not enough to slow me down. My high school soccer coach would have told me to walk it off.

  I walked six blocks, roughly half a mile, in the direction the Taurus drove as it passed my house. My neighborhood had been built in a grid pattern with side streets that ran perpendicular to the main road every block. I hung a left at one. I couldn’t see the Taurus, but the church was a block in front of me. It was an imposing building with rough stone walls and stained glass windows. It had plenty of shadowed nooks in which to hide. Hopefully my tail was in the lot, and equally important, hopefully they weren’t expecting me to flank them.

  I walked straight ahead at a leisurely pace, being careful to avoid drawing undue attention to myself. The Taurus was on the edge of the front parking lot about a hundred yards to the left of where I stood. There were a dozen or so cars as well as the church’s small, front lawn between us. I considered my surroundings for a moment and then walked straight ahead to the church’s rear. I could hear music inside. Wednesday night services, maybe. The noise masked my footsteps some, and the shadows hid me fairly well.

  I pulled out my firearm and chambered a round before edging around the corner of the church and onto its main lot. The Taurus was straight ahead, maybe twenty–five yards away. The driver’s window was cracked open, and he dangled a cigarette through the opening. I pushed off from the building and sprinted forward, my Glock held in front of me. The driver saw me running, but he didn’t have a chance to do much more than flinch. His partner never saw me coming. I smashed the rear driver–side window with the butt of my gun. Glass shattered inward onto the rear seat, sprinkling like rain against a red camping cooler. Both men jumped.

  “Hands on the dash now.”

  Neither man moved for a moment.

  “What the fuck, Rashid?” said the driver, pounding his hands against the steering wheel. “This is my wife’s car.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place where I had heard it.

  “Get your hands on
the dash or I will end you right now,” I said, pressing my firearm through the now broken window. I held it against the driver’s head. He stiffened.

  “Relax, Ash,” said the passenger, stretching his hands in front of him to reach the dashboard. “We’re on the job.”

  I recognized that voice. Detective Greg Doran from Special Investigations. I shifted on my feet and licked my lips, breathing hard.

  “What are you guys doing following me?”

  Doran turned around and faced me.

  “Why don’t you put the piece away and we’ll talk like adults?”

  I considered for a moment, but then did as he requested and slipped my firearm back in my jacket. Both men got out of the car after that, but the driver seemed more interested in his back window than anything else. Doran leaned against the rear bumper.

  “Now that we’re all comfortable,” I said, casting my gaze from one to the other detective. “Why is a detail following me and who authorized it?”

  “You’re paying for my window,” said the detective I didn’t know. “I hope you know that.”

  I glanced at him.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said. The guy looked as if he were going to bull rush me, but Doran put his hand up, stopping him. I nodded my thanks and then looked from one to the other. “Now can you answer my question? Why are you watching me?”

  Doran crossed his arms, his eyes unblinking as he stared back at me.

  “Why were you at Nathan Cutting’s house?” he asked.

  The question took me back for a second, but I caught myself quickly.

  “Visiting a friend,” I said. “Does it matter?”

  Doran shrugged slightly.

  “You tell me,” he said. “People you visit keep ending up dead. There aren’t that many dots to connect.”

  “I was checking something out.”

  “You’re on vacation,” said the detective I didn’t know. I looked at him and then back to Doran.

  “Who is this douche bag?” I asked.

  “Detective Smith,” he said, his face expressionless. “Now answer Detective Doran’s question. What were you doing at the house?”

  I snickered and looked down.

  “If you guys have any more questions, you can direct them to my union lawyer. You can also tell Lieutenant Bowers that he ought to send better detectives if he wants to follow me next time.”

  I smiled at them both and headed back towards my house via the main street. Doran and Smith’s Taurus passed me about a block down. The driver, I imagine it was Smith, gave me the finger; I waved in return. By the time I got back to my house, Hannah and Megan were back. My wife was in the kitchen slicing the chicken I had purchased while Megan was watching a cartoon on the Disney channel.

  We ate dinner on the back patio as evening faded to night. Hannah was disappointed when I said I had another errand to run, but she seemed more than a little relieved when I told her detectives would likely be watching the house for the next few days. I figured it didn’t matter if those detectives were investigating me; they’d still protect my family if need be. Hannah and Megan went back inside after dinner, but I stayed on the porch and took out my cell phone. I dialed Olivia’s cell and waited for her to pick up. I left a simple message when she didn’t.

  “It’s Ash. I found something at the Cutting’s. Call me back when you can.”

  I hung up the phone and sipped on a glass of iced tea left from dinner. Olivia called me back about five minutes later. I heard the swoosh of a freeway in the background, making it difficult to understand her.

  “I’ve only got a minute, but what’d you find?”

  “A gun. Kid hid it in a safe in his floor,” I said, turning the volume on my phone higher. “He knew someone was after him.”

  It sounded as if Olivia said something else, but it was muffled by the rush of traffic.

  “Is there any way you can go somewhere a little less noisy?” I asked. I don’t know if Olivia said anything in response, but I heard a car door opening and closing. The freeway noise dissipated. “Where are you?”

  “In the parking lot at work,” she said. “You stirred up a lot of shit today.”

  “By catching the tail Bowers put on me or making him look like an idiot in front of the Prosecutor?”

  Olivia snickered, but there was little merriment in it.

  “You need to learn to quit when you're ahead, Ash,” she said. “Watch your back.”

  I nodded even though she wasn’t there to see it.

  “You think he’ll keep the surveillance on my house?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Only this time, you’re not going to see them.”

  That was fine with me. As long as they were watching my house, Hannah and Megan were relatively safe.

  “Forget about Bowers for now. Robbie Cutting was murdered, and I’m guessing he knew who did it.”

  Olivia paused for a moment, presumably thinking it through.

  “Okay, I’ll play along. Suppose he was murdered. Let's also suppose you find out who did it. What are you going to do?”

  I glanced at my house. I could see Hannah through the kitchen window. She glanced up and smiled at me. I returned it as well as I could, unsure how I should answer Olivia.

  About six years back, my first partner in homicide and I caught a case involving a security guard at a university downtown. Two girls on campus had gone missing, and we figured the guard was good for it even if we couldn’t pin it on him. If we had waited to nail the case down, the girls were almost guaranteed to be dead before we could find them. My partner and I didn’t like that option, so we broke into the guy’s house while he was at work. Unfortunately, we were right about the guy, but wrong about the timing. The girls were both dead in his basement. Worse than that, since we broke in early, the evidence was fruit of the poisonous tree. We couldn’t use it in court because we found it while conducting an illegal search.

  It had been a nasty case, and nobody liked the outcome, especially me. I ended up borrowing a stack of photos from an old sex crimes case and hiding them along with marijuana in the guy’s car. A drug dog sniffed him out at the post office, and he was arrested and convicted for possessing child pornography. Somebody slit his throat in the shower on his second day in prison.

  I’ve never questioned if I did something wrong that day with the pictures or with the search. Given the chance, I’d do both again and sleep fine for the rest of my life. The system needs people like me to work. Right, wrong, justice, injustice. The concepts sound good in a sermon or in a speech, but things are more complicated in real life. In real life, you’ve got to get your hands a little dirty, and occasionally you’ve got to stick them in so much shit you’ll wonder if the stink will ever come out. I knew that, and I accepted it. At the same time, there was a big step between planting evidence on a suspect I know is guilty and taking that suspect out myself. I didn’t know if I had a right to do that.

  Olivia must have sensed my hesitancy because she asked if I had hung up.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “You’re going to have to figure it out quick, Ash, and I’m not going to help you. You want my advice, though? Get rid of anything you found at the Cutting’s house, quit this investigation of yours, and spend time with your family. Stop stirring up shit before somebody gets seriously hurt.”

  “Is that what you’d do?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I guess Olivia wasn’t the person I thought she was.

  “I’ll give your advice consideration,” I said. “Take care.”

  I hung up after that and leaned back in my chair. Losing Olivia was a loss, but not a big one. I had hoped she’d be able to go with me that night as a small show of force, but I could do it without her. She was a good detective, but we were from different worlds. In hers, everything lined up neatly and precisely according to set, unalterable rules. I didn’t really believe in rules, something that had made our brief partnership diff
icult.

  Since Olivia wasn’t going to help me, I needed to call in some backup. I took out my cell phone and thumbed through its address book.

  Indianapolis has a couple million residents, including a number of forensic pathologists in private practice. Some were willing to help out the law–enforcement community when we needed outside testing of a piece of evidence. One of them, Dr. Mack Monroe, happened to be the head of the pathology department at my wife’s hospital. Hopefully he’d still be at work.

  He answered on the third ring.

  “Mack, this is Ash Rashid from IMPD. How are you?”

  “Be better if you guys paid my last bill.”

  I probably should have expected that from my department. We hired Mack a couple of months earlier when an inmate we convicted appealed his sentence and was granted a retrial due to alleged mistakes in IMPD’s forensics lab. The inmate’s family hired an outside consultant to tear the lab’s procedures apart, but Mack rebutted everything and argued that the case was sound. The jury ruled in the state’s favor, so the inmate was back in jail where he belonged.

  “How much do we owe you?” I asked. “I might be able to make some calls and get it pushed through.”

  “Forty grand.”

  I swore under my breath.

  “You worked for five days.”

  “Yeah, and in those five days, I gave you boys a notch in the ‘W’ column. Good verdicts don’t come cheap. Now what do you want, Ash?”

  I took a breath before speaking. Forty grand was a lot, even for five days of expert testimony. The fee made me suspect there was something else going on, but I didn’t ask.

  “I’m working a case. I need a substance tested for cocaine. I wondered if I could hire you for it.”

  Mack actually chuckled.