He searched the cartons, staggering a little, pausing to check the remains of Karsch for signs of life. He found Thinnes’s clothing in the second box and used Thinnes’s undershirt to dress the wound. “Best I can do in the field.”
“Thanks,” Thinnes said. He gestured toward Karsch’s body. “He killed Ray Crowne hoping I’d think Ray murdered Finley, and Ray’s death would end the investigation.” As Caleb helped him into his pants and shoes, he added, “He sabotaged my car just because I suspected Finley’d been murdered.”
“He was blackmailing Margolis,” Caleb said. “It would’ve ruined Margolis and canceled Karsch’s meal ticket if anyone found out.”
“The department referred some of the guys to him around the time young Margolis was arrested. That must’ve been how he found out. Probably heard about Berringer that way too—from the cops he was treating.” Thinnes shook his head and winced at the stabbing pain the movement caused. “I heard him say working for the police department had its compensations. I thought he was talking about job satisfaction. He never seemed like the kind of arrogant bastard that would kill for money—always seemed so eager to be helpful.”
“Most of us become therapists to work out solutions for our own problems, but a few do it for the power it gives them to manipulate others.” Caleb glanced around the room. “I think we oughta call the cops.”
“No phone.”
“That’s par.”
“Get me outta here.”
Caleb nodded and offered him a hand up. Thinnes grunted as he stood. He put an arm around Caleb’s neck.
Reaching for the doorknob, Caleb asked, “You sure you know me well enough for this?”
“Well, anybody’d let a man bleed all over him…” Thinnes trailed off as they shifted around to squeeze through the doorway, then added, “You can’t get much more intimate than that.”
“You have a point.” He stopped to pick Thinnes up, lifting him with a little grunt.
“Looks like we have an opening in the department for a shrink. Interested?”
“Perhaps.” Caleb’s voice grew softer with the exertion as he carried Thinnes toward the exit. “And maybe I could interest you in a cat…”
More from Michael Allen Dymmoch
Caleb & Thinnes Mysteries
The Death of Blue Mountain Cat
The art world is the backdrop when a controversial artist reaches the end of his fifteen minutes of fame.
Native American artist Blue Mountain Cat has a style described as "Andy Warhol meets Jonathan Swift in Indian country." When he's murdered at an exclusive showing in a conservative art museum, Detective John Thinnes has no shortage of suspects. Targets of the artist's satire included a greedy developer, a beautiful Navajo woman, and black-market antiquities dealers. Even the victim's wife merits investigation.
Thinnes drafts psychiatrist Jack Caleb to guide him through the terra incognita of the art world, and their investigation turns up a desperate museum director, a savage critic, a married mistress, and shady dealings by the artist's partner. Thinnes and Caleb connect several apparently unrelated deaths as they follow leads from Wisconsin to Chicago's South Side and the mystery's explosive conclusion.
Incendiary Designs
Arson, passion, and religious fanaticism set Chicago ablaze in the deadliest summer on record.
While jogging through Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Dr. Jack Caleb runs into murder—a mob setting a police car on fire— with the officer still inside. Caleb rescues the man, but later the cop's partner is found stoned to death. Detective John Thinnes is assigned to investigate.
Evidence points toward members of a charismatic church, but too many of them die in arson fires before the cops can round them up. When arson kills the apparent ring leader, it's too much coincidence. The remaining cop killers plead guilty; the case seems to be closed. But as Chicago heats up in the deadliest summer on record, it becomes clear that a serial arsonist is still at large.
A physician friend of Caleb's is implicated when some of the fire victims are found to have been drugged. To exonerate the man, Caleb sets a trap for the killer, and Thinnes and Caleb are nearly incinerated when the doctor's trap brings the case to a fiery finish.
The Feline Friendship
When a vicious rapist crosses the line into murder, Detective John Thinnes and his prickly new partner draft psychiatrist Jack Caleb to help them track the killer down.
When a young woman is brutally raped in the posh Lincoln Park neighborhood, Chicago Police detective John Thinnes catches the case—even though Thinnes hates working rapes. Worse yet, he has to deal with a new female detective who has a chip on her shoulder the size of a 12 gauge shotgun.
A second victim is murdered, and the rapes become "heater cases." What started as a simple investigation, soon twists around earlier, similar crimes. Tempers flare; the detective squad polarizes across the gender line. Dr. Jack Caleb, a psychiatrist and police consultant, is asked to mediate. But Thinnes's sometime-ally finds himself with conflicts of interest occasioned by their friendship and Caleb's own disturbing case load.
The investigation ranges from Chicago's Lincoln Park to the northern Illinois city of Waukegan. And the explosive climax explores not only the karma of evil but the beginning of a beautiful Feline Friendship.
White Tiger
In Vietnam, white is the color of death. The 1997 murder of a Vietnamese woman in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood brings Dr. Jack Caleb and Detective John Thinnes together to catch another Vietnamese transplant—a deadly criminal known only as the White Tiger.
The TV news report of a woman's murder in Uptown leaves psychiatrist Jack Caleb flashing back to Vietnam and sends him running to his own shrink.
Assigned to investigate, Chicago detectives John Thinnes and Don Franchi find the victim's son, Tien Lee, curiously unmoved by his mother's death. Their preliminary canvass of the dead woman's building and neighborhood reveals that Hue An Lee was well liked and well off, and she had never quarreled with anyone but her "good son."
Attending the autopsy next morning, Thinnes realizes that he knew the victim when he was stationed in Vietnam—twenty-four years earlier. Thinnes is pulled off the case when an anonymous tipster alleges he'd been intimate enough with Mrs. Lee to have fathered her son. But Thinnes can't let go. And when a schizophrenic man shows up at Mrs. Lee's wake, connecting the deceased to another Vietnam vet and to an unsolved murder in wartime Saigon, Thinnes starts a retrospective investigation of that crime. He solicits Dr. Caleb's help. Tien Lee complicates the case by insisting that the paternity allegation is an insult to his dead mother. He tries to keep Thinnes on the case.
Dr. Caleb's therapy leads him to relive his own in Vietnam War experiences. When he's brought into the Lee case by a request to help the schizophrenic mourner, Caleb teams up with Thinnes and his partner to discover the identity of the White Tiger and to set a trap for the elusive killer.
M.I.A.
This gripping novel of suspense is a tale of violent men and violent passions, of missing friends, of loss and love and discovery.
The accidental death of Rhiann Fahey’s second husband leaves her paralyzed by grief and has her son Jimmy cutting school and drinking. The widow’s problems are compounded by unwanted advances from her dead husband’s friend. She does her best to cope, returning to work, dealing patiently with Jimmy’s misbehavior, telling Rory Sinter she isn't interested.
Then a mysterious stranger moves next door. John Devlin offers Rhiann beer and sympathy. He offers Jimmy work.
When Sinter tries to discredit John, then beat him to death, Rhiann comes to John’s rescue. But she discovers her perfect neighbor isn’t what he’d seemed—which leads her to investigate, and to see John in a different light altogether.
A beautifully written story with characters who come to life from the first page, M.I.A. shows one more side of Michael Allen Dymmoch’s powerful storytelling ability.
The Fall
How far would you go
to save your life and your world?
After a nasty divorce, single mother Joanne Lessing finally has her life together, and she’s made a name for herself as a photographer. Then, while on assignment, she witnesses a hit and run. Property damage only. No big deal, she thinks. So she does the right thing—calls the cops. Joanne is dismayed when FBI agents arrive with the local detective. They admit the hit and run driver was a mob killer fleeing the scene of his latest hit. Joanne is relieved to find she can’t really identify the hit man.
But when she sees the killer again while on another assignment, she takes his picture and finds her new life and her son’s future threatened. Caught between the Mob and the FBI, she’s on her own...
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The Man Who Understood Cats Page 23
