City of Prey: An Ava Gold Mystery (Book 1)

by Blake Pierce

  “Christ,” Frank muttered under his breath.

  He turned from his crouched position, looking out of the alleyway he was currently in, to the street. There were only a few curious onlookers trying to sneak a peek past the police. As he watched, he saw an intimidating figure approach from the street. Both coppers parted to let him through. It was Minard—and when Captain Minard made a sudden appearance at a crime scene, it usually meant hard times were ahead.

  Frank turned back to the body, preferring to see the two hatchet wounds to the face rather than Minard’s icy stare.

  “Is it true?” Minard said as he approached. And then, as he came up behind Frank, he said: “Shit.”

  “It’s recent, sir,” Frank said. “I don’t know how someone didn’t see him.”

  “I’ve got men all over the city right now, looking for anyone that looks to be in a hurry, slinking through the alleys.” Minard walked past Frank, then past the body and hunkered down on the other side.

  They both looked at the body of Deidre Idelman in revered silence. Her WB whistle hung from her neck at a slant, touching the grimy alley floor.

  “Dd you know Ava Gold was giving an interview on the radio when this likely happened?” Minard said.

  “Yeah, I guessed at the timeline.”

  “You know I approved the interview?”

  Frank looked up, slightly surprised, but nodded. “It was a good decision. Smart move.”

  Not taking his eyes away from Deidre, he shook his head. “It doesn’t really seem that way now, does it?”

  “Sir, there’s no way you could have known. None of us.”

  “Where is she now?” Minard asked.

  It was the one question Frank was hoping would not get asked. He hadn’t known Ava’s whereabouts for almost twelve hours now. He hadn’t even known she was going to do that damned interview on the radio until he heard someone at the station talking about it.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Minard did not respond with the explosion Frank had been expecting. He did look at him with those icy eyes, though. “Did I not tell you to keep an eye on her?”

  “Yes, sir. You did. But when she brought in Tony Two like that…I thought it was over. I knew she had doubts, but I had no idea she’d keep digging.”

  “Seems she was smart to do that,” Minard argued. “Because here we are, looking at a third victim, while Tony Two is sitting in a holding cell. Seems Gold was right about it not being Tony Two. It’s a shame we’ll have to cut her loose next time I see her.”

  “What?” Frank said. “Why?”

  “Because of the timing. Yeah, the thought behind the interview was smart. It’s why I approved it even though the thought of it set my teeth on edge. But this murder, occurring when she was on the radio…that’s going to be a very bad look. It’ll speak of publicity over safety.”

  “But sir, that makes no sense.”

  “You saying I’m making a mistake?”

  “I’m saying you’re about to make a mistake. Like her or not, she’s good at this. It seems like she’s been doing it for years already. Not only that…but if you fire her now after we’ve already started making a big deal over her, that’s going to be some terrible press.”

  “We have to stop thinking so damned much about press.”

  “With all due respect,” Frank said, “have fun explaining that to yourself when you need votes to keep your job, sir.”

  Minard scowled at him. Frank’s heart was in his chest because he had never dared to speak to Captain Minard in such a way.

  “Why do you even care?” Minard interrupted. “You don’t even care enough to keep tabs on her.” He got to his feet and motioned for someone at the back of the alley to come forward. Frank hoped it was forensics. “Now,” Minard said. “Let forensics do their job. In the meantime, I think you and I can go together to let Frances Knight know that one of her ladies was killed in the line of duty.”

  Frank’s heart tumbled at the thought. And behind it was the burdensome news that Ava Gold’s job was likely gone. He looked down to Deidre as forensics stepped in, assuming that it could not have been a mistake. To so blatantly kill a member of the police force—and a woman at that—spoke of something far beyond malicious intent.

  It made him wonder if the killer somehow knew Ava Gold was the officer actively after him.

  And if that was the case, then Ava was in terrible danger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  For the second time that day, Ava found herself walking into a lower-class neighborhood. There were no flophouses in this part of town, but several houses that looked on the brink of collapse. They were small houses, some of them little more than sizable shacks. What alarmed her most of all was that this level of deterioration was less than a mile and a half away from the bustling part of town she called home.

  She approached the house marked by the address Dr. Huffman had given her. Ava’s assumption was that the mother had likely been killed in this house—and if that was the case, there was a good chance William Gault may have returned here. Maybe for nostalgia or a feeling of safety and security. From the outside, the place looked vacant, but that was true of most of the houses on this block and from where she stood, she saw a few people milling about on a porch a few houses further ahead.

  As she walked to the porch, she again wished she had Clarence’s Smith and Wesson Model 10. She’d left it at home mainly because she felt more exposed during the daylight hours. Plus, she had no idea how Minard would act if she was on the clock, roaming the streets with a gun that had not been issued to her by the NYPD. So, unarmed and quite nervous, Ava knocked on the front door. She heard the sound echoing through the house, like a stone being tossed down a cavern entrance.

  After a minute passed and one more knocking attempt, Ava tried the door. She thought it may have been locked, but a bit of force popped it open. The door had swollen with weather and heat, the bottom dragging across the cheap wood floor inside. Within about three seconds, she was certain the place was empty. There was a stagnant smell to the air, and it had the feel of a place that had not seen motion in quite a while.

  From the front door, she got a view of a hall that led all the way to the back of the house, ending in a kitchen. Almost immediately to the right, there was a large opening that revealed the living room. An old dusty couch sat against the far wall, and a single chair was to Ava’s right, tucked in a corner. And it was there that she saw what she assumed was the remaining evidence of the murder of William Gault’s mother. The top of the chair had a dark maroon stain on the back, and there were splatters of blood dried on the walls. Some if it had flaked off, much like rust, over the time the house had been abandoned.

  Ava looked around the living room, not quite sure what she was looking for now that she felt the place was empty. The last thing she wanted to do in this situation as appear lazy. If this visit did somehow become crucial to the investigation, she wanted to be able to tell Minard that she had been as thorough as possible. So, to that end, she checked the rest of the house over with a keen eye.

  The living room was featureless aside from the blood and scattered mouse droppings here and there. She walked down the hallway and saw nothing other than a dead rat, perhaps the source of the droppings in the living room. She looked over the two bedrooms and though she found nothing, became a bit more unsettled. One of the bedrooms still contained a mattress, bare and sitting on the floor. It was filthy, covered slightly in dust. She wondered if it was William Gault’s bedroom…if it was the room he had grown up in, had started nurturing his homicidal traits in.

  She left the room and then checked the water closet—a room too small and inefficient to be considered a bathroom. It smelled of mold. The small tub was slightly discolored and countless bugs lay dead in the bottom. Ava backed out of the water closet and checked the kitchen, again finding nothing.

  Off of the kitchen, there was a thin door along the back wall, partially opened and giving a glimpse
of the dusty back yard. There was another door to the right, likely a closet or cellar entry point. She opened it and found that it revealed wooden stairs that led to the cellar. It was dank and dark but she started down right away in the interest of being thorough. The stairs were short and when her feet touched the bare earth below, there was only about a foot between her head and the beams of the floor overhead. With the door open above, a bit of daylight came down the stairs, barely revealing a dirt floor.

  The floor had been dug up here and there in a methodical way. Some of the holes were about a foot and a half deep. Ava assumed this was from the police investigation as they’d searched for the mother’s body. All the holes were empty, and one had even scraped the pipes for the indoor plumbing in the water closet. When Ava could verify that there was indeed nothing to see in the cellar, she hurried up the stairs and was delighted to breathe in the stale air of the house.

  She started back down the hallway for the front door when she recalled her visit to Gault’s now-empty room at the asylum. The words lightly scrawled into the wall, barely there and at first sounding like nothing more than ramblings of a madman: Dead hands for dead flowers.

  “Flowers,” Ava said out loud.

  She turned around and headed back for the kitchen. She walked to the back door that led out of the house and into the back yard. As she pushed it open, the smell of the house seemed to follow her. She scanned the back yard, which did not offer a lot. It was about a quarter of an acre, closed off from the next yard over by a dilapidated picket fence. As she scanned the fence, Ava spotted what she at first thought might be nothing more than a pile of discarded wood. As she walked closer to it, though, she saw the slightly discolored dirt beneath it and noticed the odd placement of the wood.

  The placement looked off because at some point in the not-too-distant past, it had made a rectangular shape. Ava approached it and saw why: it had been someone’s attempt at a small garden or flower bed. She saw brittle shapes here and there that may have once been discarded weeds, vines, or roots. A few dry-rotted stems clung to the dirt in clumps.

  Dead hands for dead flowers…

  Ava’s heart felt as if it were deflating as she kicked the boards away. Some of the old soil spilled away. She picked up one of the sturdier-looking boards and poked at the ground. It was mostly soft and gave way rather easily for a few inches but then the natural dirt of the yard took over.

  Don’t even think about it, a voice in her head said. Go get Frank. Go tell Minard.

  But by then, she was already going to her knees and starting to dig with the board. Once she tried prying into the ground, the board splintered and snapped. She turned the board around, working with the other end. She got another few inches into the ground before it snapped again. She did the same with another board, then another. On the third, she was about eight inches down when she struck something soft and yielding—something that was definitely not dirt.

  She worked around the area, exposing an area of about six inches by six inches. She was sweating profusely by this point, but barely noticed. She found herself looking at some sort of fabric, something that had once been blue but was now a faded gray. She then dug to the right, no longer going for depth.

  When the dirt started coming away easier, broken apart by what was buried there, she used her hands.

  After about three minutes of using her hands, she jumped back, her stomach riding a tumultuous trail toward her throat.

  A face. There was part of a face looking up at her. It was decomposed and ghoulish, skin and tissue mostly eroded away completely. but beyond that and the empty eye sockets that stared up at her, she saw one other thing that was just too difficult to overlook.

  Just above one eye and all the way up to the portion of the head still covered by dirt, there was a long, deep groove—the sort that would easily be made by a hatchet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  She was panting for breath and coated in sweat when she arrived at the precinct. At some point during her run back, she had removed her shows to run faster, but she had no clear recollection of doing it. When she ran through the doors and directly to Frank’s desk, she was not at all surprised to see it empty. He glared around the bullpen and saw that several people were looking at her. The good humor they usually scoffed at her with was not gone, though. Maybe because she looked like a mess, covered in sweat, her hands and arms covered in dirt up to the elbow.

  Through the glares, she caught sight of Frank. He had noticed her, standing with three officers and apparently broken from an intense conversation when she’d come in. He said something to one of the officers and then hurried over to her. She hated that every single set of eyes was on them. It made her feel like she was on display…or that they were waiting for some sort of show to entertain them.

  When he approached her, Frank did not stop. He took her by the arm, said, “Come on,” and ushered her toward Minard’s office. Ava was vaguely aware of other officers murmuring all around her but was too focused on Frank’s odd behavior to pay much attention to it. In a whirlwind of motion, Frank opened the door to Minard’s office without even knocking. He did not push her inside, but it was close.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  Minard sat behind the desk, a mask of worry covering his face. He regarded Ava for a moment, puzzled by her dirty appearance. “I might ask you the same thing,” he said. “What the hell, indeed.”

  “I have the killer,” she said. “I have a name and a—”

  “Well, we have another body,” Frank said.

  “What?”

  “He’s right,” Minard said. “Just three hours ago.” He took a deep breath and, through a scowl, added: “It was Deidre Idelman.”

  It simply didn’t register for her. Deidre Idelman was a cop. How was she dead? How was she a victim of the hatchet killer?

  “Deidre? You’re…you’re sure?”

  “I knelt right next to the body,” Frank said softly. “And it was the killer, no doubt about it.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t…”

  I sent them out to find him, she thought. Deidre was out there looking for the killer. This is my fault. I sent her to her death…

  “Gold,” Minard snapped. “Do you understand what we’re telling you?”

  She nodded distantly. “Frances…does she know?”

  “Yes. She’s downstairs with the other women. We’ve asked them to take the next few days off until this is wrapped.”

  “I know who it is,” she said. “The killer, I know—”

  “Like you knew it was Tony Two at first and made a whole scene about it?” Minard said. “Like you knew it was Lester Stubbs?”

  “Sir, you haven’t even let me question Stubbs.”

  “Because I’ve had other officers that aren’t busy making a public spectacle do it instead. And so far…yeah, it seems like you got it wrong with him.” He was nearly growling at this point, but he seemed to realize it. He stopped, took a breath, and looked at her as earnestly as he could. “Gold, I know I gave you permission for that interview. But either as a result of that interview or just out of pure unlucky coincidence, it now looks wretched…wretched timing, an awful overall situation. You are no longer on this case.”

  She had just started to fully process Deidre being dead when she heard these last words. She wanted to sit down but feared if she did, she may never stand up again. She took a single step closer to Minard’s desk and lifted her hands in front of her, almost as if she were pushing an invisible force.

  “See this dirt?” she asked, her voice somewhere between fury and overwhelming sadness. “It’s from a shallow grave I found out on Neibolt Street.”

  “Shallow gr—” Minard started. But now, it was Ava’s turn to interrupt.

  “It was at the old home of a recently cleared asylum patient named William Gault, who was sent to the asylum because he insisted he killed his mother by hacking her in the face with a hatchet. The mother was never found. But sh
e’s there, in the back yard…”

  The looks of horror and bewilderment on their faces may have given her a bit of satisfaction if it wasn’t for the overwhelming wave of guilt riding up in her. And on that wave, there was one single statement roaring like an ocean in her head: You sent her out. It’s your fault she’s dead.

  “Where did you get the information leading you there?” Minard snapped.

  “I looked into local mental institutions for men who had recently been released. I spoke to a…a doctor…Dr. Huffm…”

  The world started to sway and she finally did allow herself to sit down. She half-sat-half-collapsed into the chair in front of Minard’s desk. She felt her face crumpling up in anguish and felt a tight knot forming in her chest—a knot that would certainly result in guilt-ridden weeping when it broke.

  “Ava?” Frank said. “Ava, are you okay?”

  “I sent her,” Ava said. “I told them my theory and told them where to look and now she’s dead.”

  “We know you suggested it,” Frank said. “We spoke with Lottie just after it happened and…Ava, no one blames you.”

  It did no good. They were just empty words, though somewhere in the back of her tormented head, she recognized that Frank Wimbly was trying to comfort her…in front of Minard no less.

  “Go home, Gold,” Minard said. He did not sound angry, and it was clear that he was trying to be understanding of her situation. “I told the same of the rest of the Women’s Bureau. Go home. I’ll call you in after this all blows over and we’ll see if we can salvage the future for you. Maybe another precinct, maybe—”

  This time, it was Frank who interrupted and even in her saddened stupor, Ava could tell that Minard was beyond annoyed.

  “I agree, she should not be here right now,” Frank said. “But for right now, I’d like the details of what she found.”

  “We can’t keep chasing her leads, based on how the last two ended up,” Minard argued.

  “Fine. But she’s reported a shallow grave with a body. Even if it’s not related to this case, it needs to be investigated.”