DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by BREARTON, T. J.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Suspected boyfriend; guy named Perry Brady. The term I heard was ‘fuck buddy’ — not my choice of words.”

  “Okay, we got Perry Brady and I got a guy named George Lambert. He’s the caretaker of the place.”

  “Three people said they saw her this morning. One was the lesbo who answered the door. Teisha.”

  Now wasn’t the time for a lecture on homophobic slang. Hamill went on, “There’s one other roommate, Alexa, and then there was a friend who spent the night last night.”

  “Name?”

  “I wrote it down. All three said that she left for class this morning.” Hamill gripped the door handle as Dana took a sharp turn. “Drank her coffee, had a banana, took her bag and left.”

  “Was she wearing a jacket when she left?”

  “I would imagine. Cold November day.”

  “No jacket found at the scene, remember?”

  “Right.”

  Dana rode the gas as they neared the intersection with Route 9. She could see the flashing police lights.

  “What did you get from the girl on the porch?” asked Hamill.

  “Just the name of the maintenance man. And the name of the owner. First name anyway. And that Sonia and Lori both moved in this summer.”

  “That’s all you got? Shit.”

  “I got interrupted. The call from Oreck.”

  Hamill’s competitiveness put Dana on the defensive, even though she knew he was just busting her chops, the way he always did, keeping things light. That was how Robert Hamill dealt with things. He’d been the same since high school. Dana knew she didn’t march to the same drummer. At least, not lately. Since seeing Sonia Taylor in the river this afternoon, something was happening to her. Her tight grip was loosening. Some things were unraveling too fast.

  “You call Shawn? This is going to go all night.”

  Dana was silent. She had yet to check in with her husband, but he knew the drill, and wouldn’t expect a call. Still, Hamill’s question stung.

  Hamill asked, “I mean, you’re still talking, right?”

  This was the last thing Dana needed right now. Hamill acted like the concerned friend, but she knew part of his sick male mind was angling for his own way in. She should never have confided in him in the first place about her personal troubles, but being together as much as they were made it tough to always keep life compartmentalized. The trouble she’d been experiencing in her marriage to Shawn had been going on for months. Probably longer; things had been gridlocked for a year. Stepping out on him had never crossed her mind, but it had crossed his that she would. It seemed obvious to Shawn that she was cheating. With Robert Hamill, most probably.

  Hamill would have jumped at the chance. Not that she felt so appealing, it wasn’t that. But they had a history, an ill-advised make-out session one drunken night in high school, and some part of Hamill was still waiting to finish what he’d started.

  She spun the wheel and the two detectives leaned with the car as it screeched around another corner and onto Route 9.

  A moment later, Dana jammed the brakes and brought the Corsica to a sharp halt. Two local cops unspooling crime-scene tape and setting cones flashed dirty looks. Traffic was going to be waved through along one lane.

  Dana jerked the car forward and got moving again, taking that lane, eliciting more annoyed looks from the cops for her erratic driving. She felt a flare of anger, and that sense of peril pressing in.

  She was about to look at the second dead body of the day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN / Close to Home

  The detectives watched as the girl was hoisted out of the water on a stretcher, bloated and discolored in the glaring lights. The two of them stayed back for now, letting the evidence techs swarm over the scene.

  “The backpack was here this time,” Hamill said to Dana. They stood in the high grass in between the marsh and the lake, just outside the garish area lights. Crime scene investigators combed over the banks, scuba divers dragged the marsh, marked the rocks.

  “That’s because it was the kids who took it last time. If the kids hadn’t taken it, it would’ve been with her.”

  Hamill nodded. It was their first insight; if there was a killer, he or she might have left the backpacks deliberately.

  The medical examiner was coming towards them, the lights framing her into a silhouette. She was removing her gloves as she came. Her name was Janine Poehler; Dana had met her before, and she was the one doing the forensic pathology work on Sonia Taylor.

  “She’s been there four, maybe five days,” Poehler said.

  Hamill added, “Looks awfully swollen.”

  “The process gets sped up if the body is in water.” Dana’s own voice was low, hoarse.

  “That’s right,” Poehler agreed. She was a long-time resident of Plattsburgh. She was often the one to notify the next of kin, usually when deaths were ruled accidental. Sonia Taylor’s parents lived four hours away, in Schenectady, and state troopers had been sent to their home. Poehler was looking for an ID on the girl in the marsh, in case she was doing the death notification on this one.

  “That’s a long time,” said Hamill. “Not a lot of foot traffic through here?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Nobody really comes down here. Sometimes kids. They tag the bridge.”

  Dana recalled the graffiti from earlier. “Any specific tags?”

  Poehler gave her a look. She was older, pretty, at the end of her career. Word was she was dating John Swift, a recently retired state police detective. “A graffiti specialist, I am not. It all looks like a mess to me.”

  “What have you got for us on Sonia Taylor?”

  Poehler narrowed her wizened eyes. “Not much in one hour, Detective Gates. Then I got this call.”

  “I understand.”

  “The tox screening will tell me what drugs might be involved, if any. But you know how tox screenings go. It could be a few weeks; longer.”

  Dana nodded. Tox screenings were brutal. Five, six weeks, easy. And the water would complicate things. Especially if had been absorbed into the body, diluting the blood. They didn’t have weeks, though.

  “No marks aside from some superficial scrapes and bruises,” Poehler went on. “No immediate visible signs of blunt force trauma or strangulation, no deep wounds, nothing. But as you observed, Detective Hamill, the body has gone through several post-mortem stages. It’s hard to know.”

  Another figure approached. It shaped out as an evidence tech wearing a waterproof suit and boots, holding up the dripping backpack. An evidence tag hung from the zipper.

  Dana stepped forward and grabbed the bag, set it in the grass and unzipped the main compartment. There were textbooks and notebooks, badly damaged from the long submersion. “Is it possible the body drifted in from the lake?”

  The tech shrugged. “There isn’t much of a current. It’s possible. Not likely, but still possible.”

  She poked gingerly at the books with a gloved finger. “How come this girl is missing for five days, and we have no missing person’s report, nothing?”

  She pulled out one of the notebooks and flipped to the inside cover, looking for a name.

  “College,” said Hamill. “Kids have hangovers that last a week. Don’t go to classes. Drop out. They’re away from home, parents don’t know.”

  “Yeah, but they have roommates.” Dana dug through the bag. “Boyfriends, girlfriends. Sometimes jobs. People who will notice they’ve just fucking disappeared.”

  She winced at her slip of the tongue, and could feel the air grow tense as the others sensed her irritation. She swallowed it down and took out another notebook, still searching for a name.

  Hamill loomed. “Sure, well, maybe someone did, partner. Maybe Oreck has it registered, you know?”

  Dana took a breath. Hamill might be right. Oreck had sounded really wound up on the phone and Dana seemed to have caught his mood. She was about to say something when she saw the name in faded blue ink.
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  Instead of a rush of excitement, Dana again felt like she’d put her feet into an icy flue.

  “Last name looks like it could be Arbruster. First name is Holly.”

  * * *

  The scene along the shore of Lake Champlain had its jurisdictional issues, but the Plattsburgh Chief of Police, Dan Oreck, let the state police take it over completely. He seemed grateful to be out of it.

  As Hamill had suspected, the city police had received a call, two days prior, that a girl was missing. They hadn’t started searching right away; Oreck stuck rigidly to protocol. Since Arbruster wasn’t a juvenile or elderly, and there was no immediate suspicion of foul play, they’d waited forty-eight hours before doing anything. They’d barely begun when the call had come in about the runner from outside O’Sullivan’s. Perhaps because he felt guilty, Oreck seemed to be the one pressing the hardest that the two cases — Sonia Taylor and this girl, Holly Arbruster, were linked. Although the forensic evidence was inconclusive this early on, Dana was inclined to agree with the chief. But probably not for the same reasons.

  Dana and Hamill sat at a Thai place along Route 3 in Plattsburgh, one of the few restaurants that wasn’t fast food, and which was still open. Hamill insisted they eat, keep their strength up, and Dana agreed because she hadn’t eaten all day. She was running on empty. The Thai noodles and the coconut chicken soup made her feel much better. She needed to think.

  “Person who reported the girl missing was Angie Gilroy, friend of the victim,” Hamill said. He slurped his noodles as he flipped through his pocket notebook. “Same girl who spent the night at Sonia Taylor’s. So we’ve got rounds to make, pard. Boyfriend of Sonia — that Perry Brady kid — maintenance man of Sonia’s house — George “Puffy” Whoever — and this girl, Angie Gilroy.”

  “We don’t know that they’re victims yet,” Dana said, tucked over her bowl.

  “What?”

  “We don’t. What we know is that two college girls are dead, within maybe five days of each other, maybe more, thirty miles apart. They go to the same school, big deal. A couple thousand other kids go to that school.” She sniffed. “You know what can happen in places like this.”

  Hamill leaned back and took a long look. “Really? Were you just at either one of these crime scenes? Because I’m pretty sure you were there. Did you see those girls?”

  “Think about what happened down in Cornell.”

  “This isn’t a rash of suicides, I don’t think, Dana.”

  “Were you at the scenes? You were at the second one. I’ve been to both. At both scenes it looks like the girls have water taken into the body. That means breathing when they go in. Alive. That means, could be, sedatives.”

  “Suicides, huh? And that’s why someone hightailed it from us tonight?” Hamill seemed hurt for the first time. And mad. “Where the fuck is my partner? Not sure who I’m talking to right now.”

  His vulgarity and tone of voice drew some looks from the surrounding tables. The closest was attended by six Asian-Americans, calmly eating, chatting and laughing.

  “Calm down,” Dana said to Hamill. She set her chopsticks down and wiped her mouth. “This is a lot for us,” she said, almost apologetically.

  “You think we can’t handle this?” He shook his head, a disappointed look on his face. “Man, you’ve really got some mice running around up there, D. What’s going on with you?”

  “What’s going on with me?” Here she was just feeling relaxed again, or so she thought. She leaned forward. “What’s going on with me, bro, is I got married. I got three kids. Three girls. Sarah is a teenager already. And in four years she’ll be going to college. Okay?”

  Hamill softened his expression. Then he slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so, pard. I mean, okay, I hear you. Close to home. But this . . . you know, I’d think you of all people would want to get to the bottom of this, not jump to conclusions. Especially not suicide.”

  “Alright, enough,” Dana said.

  Hamill just looked at her. He tossed his napkin onto the table. “I gotta take a leak.” As he passed by the group at the next table, he put on a huge smile and asked in a lilting tone, “Folks, how is everything tonight? Good?”

  Not knowing what to make of him, the diners nodded nervously and smiled, noodles hanging from their mouths. “Great,” Hamill said and proceeded to the restrooms.

  Dana sat, still fuming, despite her partner’s antics. She could talk to the captain. This was too close to home; Hamill was right.

  She folded her hands and looked out the dark windows. It would be best for everyone to TOT this to the Feds. Shit, the chief of Plattsburgh PD didn’t want it, why should she? She watched the traffic stop and start on the multiple-lanes of Route 3. She could see her own reflection, floating over the small city, a ghostly image, like her dead brother beneath the surface of the lake.

  David had never made it to college. He had only been seventeen when Dana found him, his T-shirt and shorts rippling in the shallow water. His face beneath the wavering surface, eyes open, like he had been something two dimensional, a paper cutout.

  CHAPTER EIGHT / Breaking and Entering

  Dana still insisted on driving. As she slipped behind the wheel, Hamill gave her a skeptical look. Dana nodded. “I know.” She was agreeing to drive more safely.

  The two partners didn’t need to verbalize their decision to keep going; the little outburst in the restaurant had made each of them uncomfortable, and neither wanted it repeated. It was the captain’s call, or the lieutenant’s, whether or not to contact the FBI at this point, but the two detectives had wordlessly resolved to see it through

  It was ten o’clock at night.

  “So the question is,” Hamill said as Dana pulled the Corsica out into traffic. “Who and what first?”

  “I say we go boyfriend.”

  “Roger that. Let’s go boyfriend.” He scratched at his chin and added, “See if he made his way back home after leading us on a good chase.” He waggled his thick eyebrows at her.

  They had been thinking the same thing, that the kid who’d run from them outside of O’Sullivan’s might be Sonia Taylor’s boyfriend. But the fact that he had led them near to where the second girl was lying in the water was a twisted coincidence Dana hadn’t yet been able to mentally process. It was best to just go straight to him, see if any of it could be clarified.

  In the meantime they’d had Trooper Maize, still on second shift until eleven p.m., search for the name “Maybelle” associated with any properties in the area, and any obituaries. None of three remaining renters where Sonia Taylor had lived knew the last name of their landlord. But Maize found her: Maybelle Spruce, wife of the late Denny Spruce, a Navy veteran. After a quick DMV search, Maize had come up with an address and would dispatch two of his fellow troopers to the woman’s home to break the news that one of her tenants had died. Janine Poehler would personally notify the second victim’s parents, the Arbrusters, and have them ID the body at the morgue in the morning. Sonia Taylor’s parents were on their way from Schenectady and would drive through the night. By all accounts, tomorrow morning wasn’t going to be pleasant for a lot of people.

  Within ten minutes they were back near the college campus and along the streets with rows of rented houses. The partygoers at Sonia Taylor’s place had given Hamill an address for Perry Brady, her purported boyfriend, but no one had been able to provide a phone number. Dana drove slowly down a street lined with more colonial homes. The detectives peered out at the house numbers. Students were out on the streets, shouting and laughing.

  “There it is,” said Dana.

  A home with gray siding and black shutters sat behind a small fenced-in yard. The windows were dark.

  Parking was an issue; the side of the one-way street was bumper-to-bumper with vehicles. Dana circled the block, eventually finding a spot on a cross street. It hadn’t looked like anyone was home, but they had to try. They rounded the corner, passing a group of boisterous kids. Back at the
house with the chain-link fence, they looked up at the blank windows. Then Dana pushed open the gate. No porch to this house, just a stoop with a small roof over the door. Dana knocked.

  While she waited for a response, Hamill walked around the side of the house, disappearing along a narrow passage between the wall and the cedar trees edging the property line.

  Dana cupped her hands to the glass half of the door and squinted through. They hadn’t really resolved the argument in the restaurant, of course not. Whether it was something all men did — not communicating — or it was just because she and Hamill had known each other for so long, they were able to let a lot go, but that didn’t mean there was any closure. She felt the tug of something that was trying to pull her down; her brother, reaching up from his watery grave.

  Nothing moved inside, and there was no sound. Definitely no one home. She knocked again anyway, and rang the doorbell. This time a dog barked, from within. She heard the clicking of nails on bare floor as the animal approached, then barked again, just on the other side of the door. By now, Hamill had rounded the house. He stopped behind her.

  “This the guy we saw running?”

  Hamill was holding up his phone. He’d found a picture on the college website, PERRY BRADY, a caption read, a lacrosse player.

  “What do you think?” Hamill asked.

  He wasn’t really asking if she recognized him. Dana had only got the runner’s basic characteristics, which was what they had given Plattsburgh PD. Hamill was actually asking whether or not they were going to force entry into the house and have a look around.

  “We don’t know,” said Dana, feeling something acrid on her tongue. “I was closer than you and I couldn’t see him.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Hamill said, and hung his head for effect. He playacted a kid, scuffing the ground with his shoe. Then he looked around and sighed. “These white kids all look alike anyway; can’t tell ’em apart.”

  “We’re not doing it. We call Maize, get a search going for the kid’s cell phone. Or Plattsburgh PD, run him, see if he has a sheet. Jesus, Rob.”