“It’s working,” came the reply.
“Nice work, Kara.”
She let out a faint laugh. “Umm, thanks?”
I walked to the nearest constable and asked for their radio.
“Sorry everyone, ignore those shots. Needed to get the radios working again.”
“Has anyone been able to raise Leclerc or Renaud?”
“We have them here,” came a voice through the radio. It had to be one of the French officers, the accent was unmistakable even with the semi-garbled audio of encrypted radio signals. “Leclerc has been shot in the arm, Renaud is fine. Crawford had another bomb set up, it went off when they were following him. More tear gas. He shot at them and kept running.”
“They lost him,” I said into the radio.
“Oui. We are searching for him now. The dogs are coming.”
We weren’t going to find him. That much I knew. He was gone, and with him went any chance of finding Kat.
“Link, come here.” Chen was yelling at me from where we had found the body. He was holding up a sealed plastic bag, like a Ziploc sandwich bag. Inside was a note and a driver’s license.
“Can you read it?”
“Not really.”
We still hadn’t been given anything to wash our eyes out.
“Someone who can read English and can see, come here now.” A young male officer came running up to us and knelt down beside Chen and I. “Read this, please.”
“Okay, umm, it says ‘Sorry, I usually tell you their name and details first. Obviously I couldn’t this time. So here’s what you need to know.’”
“What does the driver’s license say? Name and date of birth.”
“Adrienne Chastain. October 21st, 1979.”
“Chen, she was born on the twenty-first. She’s the sixty-sixth victim. Kat’s birthday really was just a coincidence.”
“Then she may still be alive. He’s playing with you, trying to break you. We just have to find her.”
“I know, Chen. But she could be anywhere.”
We stayed at the scene for a while longer, assisted in the excavation until Najat arrived, and tried to understand just what Crawford had set up. The seven of us that arrived were down to six, Leclerc already being at the hospital to get the bullet removed from his arm, and the six that remained weren’t doing so hot. Not being able to see extremely well and still fighting the effects of tear gas made searching for an armed suspect a bad idea.
He had set up a ring around the body with a number of stun grenades set up in the trees and gas canisters buried in the dirt. They appeared to have all been wired together so that everything went off at once. Even though he had hidden everything extremely well, we should have seen it. We should’ve been more careful. All I wanted was to get Kat back, and I had led us right into a trap.
It was a hell of a trap he had laid out, but he had plenty of time to do it. The woman in the grave, Adrienne Chastain, had been buried for four or five days by my estimate. The coroner from Lyon attended the scene and more or less agreed with my timeline, although she refused to say for certain. Every question I asked was met with, “I’ll know more after the autopsy.” Except ‘the’ was pronounced more like ‘zee’.
Najat finished the excavation of the body and the coroner left in her van to go back to the hospital in Lyon. The postmortem would be conducted the following morning. At this point, it wasn’t even necessary. We knew how she died and we knew who killed her. There wasn’t any doubt. He had led us straight to her body.
There was still the matter of Sri Lanka, but I had no desire to even think about that case. We’d leave it to the Sri Lankan authorities to deal with and they could send us whatever evidence they found. I had no intention of leaving the kids behind to go dig up a body somewhere and get no further ahead anyway. They needed me now more than ever and that was where I needed to go.
Another ambulance had arrived on scene and I took advantage of the eyewash bottle, finally getting some relief for my irritated eyes. There was still no way I was going to be able to drive safely.
“Chen, Kara,” I said as I walked back to where they were standing. “I need to get home to the kids. They’re going to have a ton of questions. You two may as well call it a day as well.”
“Chen, why don’t you go with him. I’m going to stay,” Kara said. She turned and walked away as soon as she had finished, not wanting to chance an argument.
Arguing was the last thing on my mind. There was a conflict within me, one side wanting to stay awake and keep fighting, keep searching for as long as it took; the other side wanted to hug the kids and hold them until we all fell asleep.
With any luck when we woke up we’d realize it had all been a really bad dream.
Chapter Seventeen
Link and Kasia both looked up when the door opened. They had been crying, I could see it in their eyes. When they saw me they lit up, but when only Chen and I walked into the apartment they knew what that meant.
And the tears fell hard once more.
I ran to them and scooped them both into my arms. It took everything I had to hold back the tears. Instead of focusing on Kat, I focused on Crawford and the things I wanted to do to him. Anger was a better emotion for the time being, the kids needed to see strength, not sadness.
“Where’s mommy?”
“We haven’t gotten her back yet, Kasia. But we will. Everybody is looking for her and we’re going to find her and bring her home.”
“Will you find her tomorrow?”
“I hope so, Link. The police will keep looking tonight. I wanted to come home to you guys.”
“What happened to your face?”
“You know that stuff I had for work? Pepper spray? If you get it in your eyes it really burns. Daddy got something like that in his eyes as well.”
“But you look swollen.”
I touched my face and could feel a bit of swelling on my cheeks and around my eyes. Must have reacted to it worse than I thought. I remembered when a couple of officers arrested a guy after a bar fight, they’d had to spray him. Unfortunately for him, he was a very fair-skinned redhead. I had never seen anyone’s face go so red; it was as if he had been out in the sun for far too long..
My dark skin tone saved me from some of that. Must have been the Irish side that was swelling up.
“I’ll be fine. It won’t last long.”
“Is mommy okay?”
My mind raced. How much did they know about Crawford? How much had they overheard?
“I think so, she’s probably just a little worried.”
“Doesn’t the bad man k-”
“Kasia, honey. I’m sure she’s okay. We’re going to find her.”
Maybe I was lying, maybe I was protecting them from what could be, but it was a conversation I wasn’t prepared to have with them. Not yet, not when things were still so fresh. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was dead, but the more I thought about it the more I believed Crawford would keep her alive.
I just hoped that I was right.
The kids had been staying with Julie, Aidan and Anya while Chen and I were searching for Kat. We stayed for a little longer; it gave the kids some more time to spend with their friends. I hoped that it would take their minds off of things – even if it was only for a few minutes.
“He had the whole thing planned out then? Traps and everything? Who the hell is this guy?” The kids were watching television while Julie, Chen and I talked quietly in the kitchen.
“He’s smart and he’s crafty. I’ll give him that. But he’s nuts. Thinks he’s doing God’s work,” I said.
“Do you think… I’m sorry, Lincoln. I shouldn’t ask.”
I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We don’t have anything saying he keeps people alive,
but this is different. He had set out to kill sixty-six and he has. I don’t know if he needs to kill her. I hope he doesn’t.”
“Maybe he’s just trying to throw you off your game, Lincoln. It might be a distraction,” Chen said.
“How so?”
“So he can pull off this grand finale of his.”
“Shit. Tie everyone up looking for Kat and he’s free and clear to do whatever he has planned. Fuck.”
“I know, Link. It’s not like we’re going to pull resources off of looking for Kat, but if we don’t… we’re screwed either way.”
I thought about it for a moment, toying with ideas of what to do. There was no good way to handle this. I wanted every ounce of our resources being used to find Kat, but we had no idea what he had planned. The outcome could end up being far worse and could lead to her death anyway.
“We need to figure out what he has planned,” I said. “It may be the only way to find Kat. Right now, we’ve got nothing to say where she is. If we catch him again or stop him, maybe we can get her back.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’re just going to be going in circles searching for her. And unless we start kicking down every door, we aren’t going to find her.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath; there was no relaxation to be found in it though – he was there once more and he was running from us. “Have you heard from anyone? Are we sure that he got away again?”
“They found a single set of tire tracks not far from where the body was,” Chen said. “He may have had a dirt bike or something set up for an escape. As far as we can tell, Link, he’s gone again.”
“Fuck,” I said. My fist down came down hard on the table.
“We’ll get him, Link. We got him once.”
“Because he let us. You really think he did those searches without a proxy and bought shit from the stores down the street from his apartment by accident? Like he forgot he was a wanted man? He barely even tried to hide his identity in the stores. He wanted us to find him.”
“Doesn’t matter, Link. We’ll find him again.”
I just shook my head.
I took the kids back to our apartment an hour later and we all climbed into the bed in the master bedroom. Two guards sat in the living room, standing guard more for the kids than for me. If it had just been me, I’d have told them to leave. But I couldn’t trust that Crawford wouldn’t try something else.
The kids asked more questions and I tried to remain positive, tried to give them something to grasp on to. I could tell it wasn’t enough. They could hope for the best all they wanted, but nothing was ever going to be the same until Kat was here with us once more.
When my phone rang, we all sat straight up in the bed I fumbled to answer it as fast as I could.
“Hello?”
“Lincoln, it’s Kara. Oh, sorry, you were probably…”
“It’s okay.”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing. And how the kids were.”
“Thanks. We’re surviving. It’s about all we can do right now.”
“Eddie and I are still working on this, we’re back at headquarters. Take your time with the kids, okay? They need you.”
“Kara, this isn’t your fault.”
“I want to believe you, Lincoln. I really do. But you heard him.”
“Please, don’t blame yourself.”
She sounded upset and I thought I could hear her sniffling in the background.
“I need to go, Eddie needs something. Stay strong, Lincoln. We’ll find her.”
She hung up before I could say anything else. We were all dealing with this in different ways. If Kara needed to dive headlong into the work to get through it, I couldn’t fault her. I wanted to be there as well, but the two little people lying on either side of me, their arms draped across my chest, needed me more.
“It wasn’t mommy?”
“No, honey. Not this time. It’s getting late though, we should go to sleep, okay?”
“Are you going to go looking for her tomorrow, daddy?”
“I think so, Link. Are you guys okay to hang out with Aidan and Anya again?”
“Yeah. Do we have to go to school?”
“I think I can convince Julie to keep you all home.”
“Okay,” Kasia said. “I don’t want to go back to school right now. Those people got hurt there.”
“I know, honey. But that won’t happen again, okay?”
“Okay.”
Their eyelids looked so heavy; a combination of the time and the tears weighed them down. It didn’t take them long to fall asleep. It always amazed me how easily kids could sleep even as the world fell apart around them. I knew I was going to be awake most of the night, unable to shut down the thoughts that careened through my mind.
They woke up a couple of times, startled awake by some bad dream coursing through the night. I’d hold them tighter and before I knew it they were back asleep once more. I managed to doze off a couple of times, but every time I did I saw her face and heard her voice.
She was calling out to me, begging me to save her.
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning when the kids woke up I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. My eyes were burning, although that may have been more the aftereffects of the tear gas and flash bangs then from the lack of sleep. Either way, I was exhausted.
I made breakfast for us – eggs, bacon and pancakes. We all kept looking at the empty seat, the empty placemat, throughout the meal. The looks on their faces were killing me. There is no worse pain in life than to see your children suffer. And they were suffering. Neither one of them was good at hiding their feelings; I had long ago learned to read them like the open books that they were.
We finished our breakfast and I walked them over to Chen and Julie’s apartment. They seemed to perk up a bit when they saw Aidan and Anya, but not as much as I had hoped.
“We have to go kids, you guys try and have some fun today and we’ll be home in a bit.” They both looked sad to see me go, but it was when they hugged me I knew it was alright for me to leave.
“Go find her, daddy,” Link said. “She’s probably getting bored waiting.”
I had to smile. The things kids said. I stepped back then leaned in to give them each a kiss on the forehead.
“I’ll be back,” I said, “as soon as I can be. Be good for Julie, okay.”
They both nodded.
I took that as my cue to leave. I wanted to get out before the emotions had a chance to build up. The more we hugged and the more we talked, the harder it became.
Chen and I took the elevator to the main floor then walked out the front door of the building. The walk to INTERPOL was a short one, but we took a cab in today. We had a lot of work to do.
“Did they sleep at all last night?”
“Yeah,” I said, watching the other cars pass by. “Woke up a couple of times but they went back to sleep alright. Bad dreams, I figure. We all slept in the same bed, I didn’t want to let them go.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“Barely.”
“Yeah, you look like shit.”
I laughed. “Just realized I didn’t shave.”
“Or put on a tie.”
“Really? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Just noticed now. Surprised Julie didn’t say anything. No one is going to care, Link. You could show up in your boxers.”
“I bet that Eddie and Kara won’t even notice. She called last night, said they were still working. They probably haven’t even slept yet.”
“I can only imagine the music Eddie was playing to stay awake. Thank God for Najat though… I think he made Kara uncomfortable.”
“You noticed it too, eh?”
Chen just nodded. “Strange dude, but apparently very good at what he does.”
“Yeah, he is,” I said. “On both counts.”
The cab dropped us off outside and I handed him some euros to cover the cost.
Kara and Eddie barely noticed us walk in, they both looked like zombies that had been killed then brought back to life a second time. Kara’s hair was all over the place and Eddie had the darkest circles I had ever seen.
“You guys need sleep,” I said as I walked up to them.
“Can’t,” Eddie said. “We’re on to something.”
“We didn’t want to call you yet, we’re still trying to figure it out.” Kara stood up and walked over to the screen then started tapping at various places. Different windows opened up making a cluster of photos and documents on the screen.
“Fuck. Eddie, it’s your program. You do it. I don’t get this thing.”
“Alright. Remember when Kat was…” He paused, probably thinking he shouldn’t have mentioned her. I nodded for him to go on. “When she was here she helped us get onto the whole Revelations aspect. She reminded you about the burial direction, and you had asked me to look into that before. I did, but it all seemed random. There wasn’t any pattern with them, so I abandoned the idea. A lot of the burials seemed to go with the lay of the land, so it seemed like he just dug the graves whichever way was easiest.”
He wasn’t rambling anymore. Whether he’d become more comfortable with us or it was because he was so focused, he went straight to the point. It didn’t matter why, Eddie had changed so much in the short time since the investigation started. He seemed far more confident, and with Najat by his side, much happier as well.
“But you found something now?”
“I watched the video from you interviewing him.”
“Not my proudest moment.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t do worse.” There was an awkward silence before he continued. “You brought up the upside-down crosses that were carved into the victim’s skulls. He said it was a matter of perspective.”
Death By Degrees Page 19
