* * *
It had been an explosive couple of days, an avalanche of information after days of paperwork, recuperating, and sitting on her hands. The case felt hot again, a crackling, living thing around her.
They cruised Plattsburgh’s main street, dead quiet in the middle of the night.
“We got someone following us,” Hamill said, his eyes on the rear-view mirror. “They just slipped a red light.”
“You serious?”
“Why the hell are the Feds watching us?”
Dana bit her thumbnail and looked at the side mirror. A dark blue Crown Vic trailed a quarter mile back. She could make out two shapes in the front seat. “Yarrow,” Dana said grimly.
Hamill watched the mirror, a look of hatred on his face. “But what the hell are they following us for? Because we went to the goddamn morgue? What; we’re not allowed to do our jobs now?”
He leaned into the wheel and sped up.
Dana grabbed the door handle. “What are you doing?”
The streets whipped by. They were approaching the entrance to the interstate back to Hazleton. But the Corsica didn’t have the horsepower of the Crown Vic, and soon the faster vehicle was right behind them, two ghostly faces looming behind the windscreen.
“Assholes,” Hamill said. He had the pedal to the floor. They were doing eighty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone. When he turned for the interstate, blowing a red light, the tires squealed, and an oncoming car blared its horn.
Then they were zipping along the entrance ramp, and the Vic was gone.
“We’re never going to live this down,” she said quietly.
Hamill hunched over the steering wheel, pinning the needle now at hundred. Dana reached over and touched his arm.
He flinched. “What? What are you talking about? Slipping their tail? They’re up to something.” Despite the protest in his words, he let off the throttle. The car eased down to a more sane speed. The dark farmland blurred past, hummocks of soil covered in snow.
“I haven’t been up front with you on everything,” she said. “Now, listen, hear me out. The drawings in Scott’s room. The ten-year-old kid. A naked body with a bull’s head, its eye running. Just like my eye. And the girl has the same type of drawings. Well, that one may even be hers.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled to the picture.
Hamill gave it a quick glance. “So? What the hell do the drawings have to do with anything?” But he was getting it. He had to be — it was right there. The kid had a drawing belonging to Lori Stender. Somehow it had got there, it hadn’t magically transported.
But for now, he resisted. She watched him as he drove. Whether it was the brief chase or the late hour, her partner didn’t look so hot. His eyes were red, his skin sallow.
“And when I spoke with Rakesh Lata, he said he had some correspondence with one of the girls in the study. Stender confirmed it was her. I don’t think she’s the perpetrator.” She tapped her phone. “But I think the perp is right here.”
“In your phone.”
“Spare me. The killer is connected, somehow, part of this drawing thing.”
Hamill rolled his shoulders back, straightening his spine. “Oh. Okay, oh. That’s great, man.” She smelled the booze on his breath. “Listen,” he said, “we’re done. The Feds are following us to make sure we’re staying the hell out of the way. We’ve either missed everything or fucked it up at every turn. Now you want to bring up shit about magical drawings. We’re dead.”
Dana shook her head. “We’re not dead. We’ve got three victims. Victim one, drowned in the marsh off of Lake Champlain. Victim two, drowned in the shallows of the Clair River. Victim three . . .”
“Perry-fucking-Brady is responsible for this, and we let him slip through our fingers. Who ran from us outside the bar? Huh? Who had the fucking names of the fucking victims in a book in his room? Huh? Who had the second victim’s jacket and wallet? Brady, that’s who.”
She waited until Hamill was burnt out.
“That’s interesting you mentioned the bar.”
“Oh yeah? It’s interesting?”
“I want to go back. Soon as they open tomorrow. I want to talk to the bartender. I think he said his name was Sven. The group from the study hung out there. Because they were friends.”
“Okay, so they’re friends. You thinking someone from the bar is our killer? That doesn’t exactly narrow the playing field. We’d have to comb through two, maybe three hundred unique customers who have been in and out of there since the summer.”
“I think we go one better. We get a warrant for the bar, full search, get a team in there looking for aconitum. Monkshood, women’s bane. Whatever.”
“Women’s bane?”
“One of the poisons aconitum can form. If this third girl suffered a dry drowning, we’re going to get uncorrupted blood analysis. We could have confirmed toxicology much sooner.”
She gazed out the window, thinking of Janine Poehler talking about resuscitated victims — victims where no water entered the lungs or bloodstream, who had pleasant memories of their near-death experience. Glimpses, maybe, into past lives.
Poehler was a pro. And like most pros, highly skeptical of esoteric claims. But she was also realistic. She knew that forensic science couldn’t answer all questions.
“Alright,” Hamill said. “You’re worried about a drawing,” he mocked. “But you gotta admit, you’re either babbling to me about the end of the world, or something — the end of the fourth sun — and now it’s drawings.”
“I think someone swiped Lori Stender’s artwork and it wound up in Scott Dunham’s possession. I also think someone saw the names in that book, maybe at the bar, or maybe at this place, Charlie’s. We need to find this place. We need to know who Charlie is. The bar is the place to start.”
Hamill grunted.
“Maybe our smiley face . . . I don’t know. There’s a biohazard sticker on the wall at O’Sullivan’s. That diatom looked an awful lot like a biohazard symbol.” She realized how crazy it sounded. “It’s probably nothing, but I just . . .”
Hamill put on his most deadpan face, his eyes half-lidded in the dim light. When he spoke his lip barely twitched. “You done?”
Dana didn’t reply. She pulled her handkerchief from her pea coat and dabbed her leaking eye.
“That diatom shit is a dog-and-pony show,” Hamill said. “Something for the vaunted Feds to strut around about; means nothing; you and I know it — it’s entirely circumstantial. And you think we’ll get a search warrant? Based on these little auguries you find in a microscope?”
She looked out again into the wintry darkness. What a mess. This whole case felt like a mandala painting. Once it was over, it would be wiped clean. Washed away, never to be seen again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE / The Bouncer
Yarrow and a handful of Feds, along with the state police captain and lieutenant, gathered in the BCI squad room at the barracks the following noon. Dana and Hamill leaned against the wall at the back
“We have a lot going for us,” Yarrow started. His optimism was in contrast to everyone else in the room. Yarrow was full of shit, Dana decided.
“We’ve had a breakthrough from a forensic pathology standpoint. As we speak, the third victim is undergoing an autopsy by a limnologist which will tap bone marrow for a sample of what are called diatoms. Not only that, but the third victim also drowned in a different way from the first two, forming a mucous plug, inhaling no water. So, she didn’t get water into her bloodstream, and there’s a better chance that our pathologist will be able to correctly identify any toxins used.”
Hamill leaned toward Dana and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “He said ‘diatoms.’ I must be psychic.”
Yarrow clapped his hands together. “Here’s what we know. Each girl was poisoned prior to drowning. This poison did not kill them, but rendered them unconscious, so that they drowned when they were dumped in the water.”
With his sing-song Southern drawl, the ag
ent had said everything they already knew. And taken credit for it. “We believe that the dumpsites could offer clues to the killer,” he continued. “Marsh, river, and Topper Pond.”
He glanced at Dana when he mentioned Topper. Dana maintained eye contact. Standing beside Yarrow, Bouchard watched her reaction too.
When the captain looked away, Dana closed her eyes and visualized a younger Bouchard, just twenty-four at the time, standing beside his vehicle and talking into the radio. David Gates’ body floating nearby. Dana on the rocky banks, looking on, unable to fish him out.
Yarrow clapped his hands again. Dana’s eyes fluttered open. She hated the way he clapped his hands. “Yet we’re still stymied. We have plenty of persons of interest, but all have tight alibis.” He looked at Dana and Hamill again.
“Gates? Hamill? Got anything for us?”
Dana spoke up. “I’d like to get back to the bar, O’Sullivan’s, and get a team to—”
Hamill interrupted. “With all due respect to my partner, we’ve questioned everyone who was in the bar that night. We even managed to find two other people who were out on the street, a couple heading to dinner. We had witnesses say they could remember someone standing there, but not who it was. Everyone outside remembers us running—”
“Unfortunately,” Dana jumped back in, glaring at her partner, “That’s not good enough. Perry Brady’s alibi for running is no good, either. He claims he was at this place Charlie’s — though we can’t get anything on it.”
Dana realized everyone in the room was watching their skirmish.
“It’s still one of the best leads we’ve got,” she said. “Even if it was someone running from the cops because they thought we were coming for parking tickets, that runner led us right to a crime scene. Or, close to it.”
She omitted the part about the drawing and biohazard symbols. Hamill was right; it was thin. The unknown runner was the best route. But now he was fighting her on that, too, in front of everyone. She hated to think this was because of their kiss, but couldn’t figure it otherwise.
Bouchard put his hands on his hips and glared at the two detectives like an angry father.
“Then that’s where I want you two,” Bouchard spoke up. “Back to the bar. Go around with the description of the runner again. I don’t care if we have to question all five thousand male students, Hamill. Too much time has gotten by us. I want that runner found, now.”
“Yes, sir,” Hamill said.
“Yes, Captain,” Dana added. Thank you, Captain. Thank you.
Bouchard swung around to the rest of them. If you looked with the right eyes, Dana thought, you could see the young man he’d been, his second year as a trooper, standing on the windswept shore of Topper Pond.
* * *
They sat in the Corsica outside of O’Sullivan’s, the engine running. Hamill cracked the window and lit a cigarette. “This is a waste of time.” He blew out smoke. “This is bullshit.”
“Why?”
“You want to check out the bar again, they want us to find the runner. One’s got nothing to do with the other. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
They watched as a guy and girl came out of the bar. Their breath rose in the cold air; they were smiling and laughing. The young man drew her towards him in a kiss.
“You were the one who was positive it was Brady who ran from us, Rob. Now you’re a hundred and eighty in the other direction.”
“Things change,” Hamill scoffed. “Makes no sense Brady ran if he didn’t do it. It’s a dead end.”
“Well doesn’t that tell us the runner could be our guy?”
Hamill grunted and smoked.
A much larger man came out the front door. He must’ve been three hundred pounds. He made shooing motions with his hands. He was trying to get the kissers to break it up or move on.
“Guy’s got something against PDAs?” Dana asked.
Hamill was still sulking. “Who cares. Get a room.”
“Who is that?” Dana got to the edge of her seat, staring through the windshield.
“Fuck if I know.”
“Looks like a bouncer. We never saw him before.”
Hamill glanced at his watch while taking a drag. “It’s Sunday. Football this afternoon. Maybe things get rowdy during the game.”
“Let’s go talk to him.”
“I’m gonna just finish my smoke.”
Dana frowned at her stubborn partner, then got out of the car. The air was shocking after sitting in the warm vehicle. As she neared, the bouncer glanced over at her. The apple-cheeked couple’s smiles faded as Dana stepped up onto the curb. This time, she didn’t think it was because she was a cop, even with the gun on her hip visible beneath the hem of her coat. She thought it was just because she was old. She felt old, anyway.
“Afternoon,” she said.
“Wassup?” The bouncer acted instantly defensive. He was probably the same age as the couple. He had appeared older because of his size. His neck was the same width as his head. He wore a PLATTSBURGH sweatshirt and a pair of jeans were low on his waist, his polka-dot boxer shorts tufting out, nothing else to protect him from the weather.
“Alright, Ho-tep,” the young man said to the bouncer. “You win. You didn’t have to call the cops on us.” He laughed and slipped an arm around the girl and the two of them moved off. Where the hell were their coats? It made Dana think of Sonia Taylor’s jacket. Sitting in Perry Brady’s bedroom, while her body lay in the ice-cold Clair River. She asked the bouncer, “Am I that obvious?”
“Huh?”
“They just called me out. Am I that obvious?”
“Oh,” said the bouncer. He was clearly now just realizing that Dana was, in fact, a cop, “Yeah. You are.” His eyes dropped to her holstered weapon.
“You’re name’s Ho-tep?”
“Nickname. Bubba Ho-tep. It’s a movie.”
“Haven’t seen that one. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“About?”
“You work here every weekend?”
“Most, yeah. Why?”
“It’s just that I was here a couple Fridays ago, with my partner. That guy over there in the car. You ever work Fridays?”
The bouncer fingered a fleshy bag beneath his eye and looked across the street. “That guy?”
“Yeah.”
“That guy’s your partner?”
“Yeah, why?”
The bouncer lifted his large shoulders and dropped them. Dana could hear his breathing, a faint whistling sound. He stared at the Corsica for a moment, at Hamill sitting behind the wheel.
“Yeah, I work Fridays. I mean, ah, sometimes I do.”
Dana pressed him further. “Uh-huh. Okay, well, like I said I was here couple Fridays ago, but I didn’t see you. You have that night off or something?”
Still looking at Hamill across the street. “Yeah, right. Had the night off.”
“But Fridays you usually work.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Hey,” said Dana, and snapped her fingers in front of the bouncer’s face. “You with me?”
The bouncer’s eyes jerked in his skull and found Dana again. She didn’t like the look she saw there. It was chilly on the street, that thin, angry cold of November, but she felt the heat rising within her. “So your friends call you Ho-tep.”
“Yeah, man. Ho-tep.”
“I’ll call you Tep, alright?”
“Whatever.”
“Tep, you’ve seen my partner before?”
The Corsica’s engine suddenly roared. Hamill was goosing the gas. He waved a beckoning hand behind the windshield.
“Think he wants you,” said Tep, and took a step back towards the front door.
“Looks like it,” said Dana, still watching as Hamill gave her the come here gesture with his hand. “Hey, listen — you got anybody named Charlie who works here?”
“Charlie?” He jerked a thumb at the plate glass window behind him. “Charlie the bartender?”
“Charlie quit. He worked here for forever. He just quit, last week I think.”
“Yeah? Is he a big, tall guy? Eyes are different colors?”
“Yep. That’s him. I mean, he worked here before I ever did. Least three years. Sort of made the place his own.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He did a fundraiser for the new pool table. There was a raffle that . . .”
Across the street, Hamill laid on the horn. The sound sent a bolt through her.
She held her hand up in front of Tep. “You just sit tight, okay? I’ll see what he wants. I’ll be right back.” She realized that her other hand had come close to her sidearm. The heel of her palm was resting on the grip. It had been instinctive.
Tep backed up until the door was right behind him, the name O’Sullivan’s burned in the wood behind him. He opened it, letting loose a blast of music and voices. Dana hopped off the curb and trotted back to Hamill. Her heart was beating harder as she approached the car. What the hell was going on?
She got in.
Hamill pitched his cigarette butt out the window. The car was smoky despite the open window. Hamill’s eyes were wide. He jabbed the air with a finger, pointing across the street. “I know that guy,” he said. “D, I fucking know that guy.”
“Okay,” Dana said, waving away the smoke. “So, he seemed to know you too. What’s going on? Why didn’t you come over?”
“He said he knew me?”
“Said he recognized you. Said something else, too. Said that the tall bartender here two Fridays ago, that was Charlie. Not ‘Sven.’ Guy lied to us. Made a false statement.” She looked at her partner to see if this would register with him, but he just stared at the bar. “What’s going on? Why did you stay in the car?”
“I had to make a call.”
“To whom?”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 17
