Skeleton King (Detective Damien Drake Book 4)
Skeleton King
Detective Damien Drake Book 4
Patrick Logan
Prologue
PART I – A Squirrel and a Rabbit
Summer, 1998
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART II – A Crown of Bones
Summer, 2018
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
PART III – The Church of Liberation
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
PART IV – An End to Suffering
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Epilogue
END
Author’s note
To live is to suffer,
to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Skeleton King
Prologue
Sergeant Henry Yasiv took a drag of his cigarette, feeling the warm smoke fill first his throat and then his lungs.
He rubbed his temples as he smoked, his eyes darting up and down the street that was cordoned off by police cars. It was a normal May evening in New York City—cool and damp—but it was also one that he would never forget.
Henry took another drag and this time, he held the smoke in his lungs for a moment longer than he should have. A sudden wave of dizziness hit him, which, if nothing else, served to take his mind off of what he was about to see.
The call came in at about 8:30. The caller was anonymous, but his voice was that of a male between forty and sixty years of age, if he hadn’t made any attempts to disguise it, that is.
“The King has returned,” the man told dispatch. When dispatch asked him to clarify, his response had been, “The King has returned to 9th and West 21st.”
As was protocol, even obscure and likely prank calls made to 911 in New York City were always followed up by one officer or another. The more likely the call was to be a prank, the longer it took to make it to the scene, especially if there was no further corroboration. But in this case, an eager beat cop by the name of Alan Petrovich must have been bored, or maybe he just finished stuffing his face full of donuts, when he got the call.
He had made it on the scene in under a half hour. And after he arrived, it was only five minutes before he made a call that made it all the way to the top, to Henry Yasiv, Sergeant of 62nd precinct.
And now, with W 21st blocked by police cars between 8th and 10th Ave, Yasiv found himself standing outside a large brownstone smoking a cigarette, while his men combed the interior of the building.
It was no secret, to him or to his men, that he was only delaying the inevitable. But no matter how desperate Henry was to save face, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside.
Not yet, anyway.
During his short tenure in NYC, Henry had seen a lot of death, and it was never easy. They had lied to him, telling him that, in time, he would be able to depersonalize the victims, turn them from people to things, and in doing so, death would no longer affect him the way it would a normal person.
But for Henry, this hadn’t happened yet, and maybe it never would.
“Sergeant Yasiv?”
Henry exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and turned to face one of his detectives, a man who was eight or nine years his elder.
“Yeah?”
The man’s lips twisted into a frown.
“I think you’re going to want to come look at this,” the man said flatly.
Clearly, the detective had learned how to deal with death better than he ever would.
After a final drag, Henry nodded and then flicked his cigarette onto the street.
“Lead the way,” he said.
The detective stepped into the brownstone and slipped on a set of shoe coverings in the entrance. Yasiv did the same and then took a deep breath.
“Show me what we’ve got.”
***
“Officer Petrovich came through here,” the detective, a man named Chris Wentworth said, indicating the front door of the brownstone with a thin finger. He traced a line in the air down the long hallway. “He knocked several times and then forced entry when he saw suspicious movement near the back.”
Sergeant Yasiv stared at the photographs on the walls as he moved through the hallway, trying to put a name to any of the faces of the children, the wife, the husband, that he passed. The place itself was in immaculate condition, and based on the amount of shine reflected off the occasional chrome frame, it was well looked after.
And expensive—very expensive.
“The back door was partly open,” Detective Wentworth continued, “but when Alan looked out, he didn’t see anybody, so he continued his search inside. That’s when he found this.”
Detective Wentworth pointed at the open basement door and moved toward it, but Yasiv stayed him by raising a hand.
“And where’s Officer Petrovich now?”
Detective Wentworth had been frowning since he entered the brownstone, but now the expression became even more exaggerated until it looked like his lips might slide right off his face and onto his neck.
When he pointed this time, the man’s thin finger was trembling slightly.
Officer Alan Petrovich was sitting on the couch in an adjacent room. Yasiv’s first instinct was to holler at him, to tell him to stand, to avoid contaminating potential evidence, but the way he was slumped, his face cradled in his hands, convinced Yasiv otherwise. Two uniformed officers, and a man from the CSU, were hovering over him, offering him a bottle of water and a comforting rub on the back.
It was a relief to see that he wasn’t the only one affected by death.
Yasiv swallowed hard and turned back to the basement door. With a hook of his chin, he told Wentworth to lead the way. And then he followed the detective into the basement.
Yasiv didn’t know what he would see down there, but had an expectation based on how shaken Officer Petrovich was upstairs. But what he hadn’t expected was something pristine, something unblemished, untarnished, just like the upstairs.
There was no blood splatter on the walls, no bloody footprints smeared across the hardwood floor. In fact, until Yasiv made it to the back of the room, to the pool table, nothing at all seemed out of place.
But there was something about the pool table…
Someone had laid a tarp over top of it, one of those blue camping tarps that was crinkled in every way possible, and it seemed very much out of place in this house of neatly ironed sheets.
The tarp itself was covering something irregular.
Yasiv did his best to control his breathing as he walked over to it. Several men in white plastic suits were standing around the pool table, and they all took a respectful step backward as he approached.
The expressions on the men’s faces weren’t all that different from Detective Wentworth’s.
“You have a set of gloves?”
Wentworth nodded and pulled two plastic gloves from his pocket and handed them to Yasiv. The sergeant slipped them on as he moved to the head of the pool table.
With one final deep breath, Yasiv grabbed the edge of the tarp and slowly lifted it.
At first, he saw nothing, but then one of the techs leaned in and shone a flashlight.
Yasiv’s breath stuck in his throat, which was probably for the best; had he been able to breathe, he most likely would have moaned.
Two hollow sockets stared back up at him, black pits embedded in the semi-bleached bone of a skull. On the crown of the head was a single finger bone, cemented in place.
And now, Yasiv was pretty sure he gasped.
His fingers released the tarp, and then he quickly tore off one of his gloves by using his teeth to grip the opening by his wrist.
Wentworth looked at him, eyes wide.
“You okay?”
“Have to make a call,” Yasiv said quickly. “I have to make a call.”
In the back of his mind, he was aware that people were staring at him as if he’d lost his mind, but Yasiv didn’t care.
He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and with a trembling finger, Yasiv scrolled through his contacts. When he found the name he was looking for, he didn’t hesitate before calling.
The phone rang once, twice, and then someone picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” A gruff voice demanded.
“Drake? Drake, it’s Sergeant Henry Yasiv.”
There was a short pause.
“Yeah? What is it?”
Yasiv rubbed his temples and shut his eyes for a moment.
“It’s happening again, Drake. He’s back.”
There was another pause, one that ran much longer than the first, but before Yasiv could ask if Drake was still there, the tarp suddenly slid off the pool table, revealing a complete, bleached skeleton.
Only, it wasn’t just a skeleton.
There was also a belt hanging from the hip bones.
A leather belt, with a distinct chrome buckle at the center.
As Yasiv’s eyes focused on that buckle, he realized that he recognized it.
The phone slipped from his hand and banged to the floor.
“It’s Simmons,” Sergeant Yasiv gasped. “That’s detective Frank Simmons.”
PART I – A Squirrel and a Rabbit
Summer, 1998
Chapter 1
“It’s dead,” Ray Reynolds said simply. He used a stick to lift the squirrel’s limp corpse. Its middle was crushed, and the head and legs hung low off either side of the stick.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Drake said, clutching his stomach.
Ray chuckled.
“It’s just a squirrel, get over it.”
Drake shook his head and averted his eyes as his stomach did a barrel roll.
“It’s gross as hell,” he managed from between pursed lips.
Ray lowered the squirrel to the ground.
“We should bury it,” he said absently.
Drake retched and then spat a wad of phlegm on the dirt.
“You’re a pussy, you know that?” Ray said with a laugh. “A real fucking—”
He stopped speaking so abruptly, that Drake raised his head and looked at his friend. Ray swiped the black hair from his face, and his dark eyes focused on a patch of brush just off the dirt path on which they stood.
“What?” Drake asked, finally managing to settle his stomach. Making a deliberate effort not to look at the dead squirrel, he stood and made his way to beside his friend. “What is it?”
Ray hushed him and Drake listened, but heard nothing.
“What do you—”
Ray hushed him again, this time more aggressively.
Drake rolled his eyes and went silent.
He’s just fucking with me. Trying to scare—
But then Drake did hear something—a soft mewing, a sound that a hungry kitten might make.
Ray nodded as if realizing that Drake had suddenly heard what he was listening to. And then the boy strode over to the brush, walking deliberately, with purpose.
Drake followed, but cautiously stepped in behind his friend. His heart was racing in his chest, even though he knew that this was silly. He was fourteen, not seven—no boogeyman was going to hop out from behind the bush.
And yet there was something there…
Ray bent and peeled back the shrubbery with one hand, and Drake’s breath caught in his throat.
There, lying on a piece of exposed grass, were several baby squirrels. It was difficult for Drake to determine exactly how many, given how much blood there was.
This time when his stomach rolled, it churned out his last meal—a tuna fish sandwich—and he vomited right there on the dirt.
He thought that Ray would laugh at him then, call him a pussy again, but the only thing he saw in his friend’s eyes was sadness.
“Sorry,” Drake grumbled, not really sure why or for what. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then stared off into the distance, his gaze eventually settling on the farmhouse where Mrs. Reynolds was sitting inside watching TV.
“We should go get your mom,” he offered.
Ray didn’t reply; unlike Drake, he couldn’t seem to pull his eyes away from the squirrels.
Drake didn’t want to look, but felt compelled. He took a deep breath and then flicked his eyes downward.
He saw now that there were three squirrels, all babies, two of which were already dead. The final squirrel was clinging to life and probably to the hope that their mother, the dead one on the path that Ray had picked up with the stick, would come back and save him. But one look at the way its small, furry body had been torn to shreds, and Drake knew that this was not a possibility even if the mother had been alive.
“What happened to them?” he whispered.
Ray rose to his full height, letting the shrubbery again shield the dying squirrel.
“A fox, maybe, or it could be a bird.”
Drake nodded somberly.
“I’ll go get your mom.”
Ray didn’t answer, but he was never much for rambling—that was Drake’s job. Ray was the contemplative one of the duo, while Drake liked to talk.
A lot.
Ray Reynolds reached over and pulled the shrub back, and then moved until he was hovering right over the squirrels.
Before Drake could fully comprehend what his friend was doing, Ray raised the heel of his worn running shoe and slammed it down on the top of the squirrel’s head. The whimper was immediately silenced, and the ground, already saturated with blood, turned an even darker crimson.
“No! What are you doing?” Drake asked, or thought he asked, but couldn’t be sure that he had gotten the words out before he was overcome by the urge to vomit again. As his eyes started to water and he retched, he saw Ray lift his foot again and bring it down hard on the skull a second time.
Chapter 2
“Turn on the hose, Drake.”
Drake, who was still in a daze, reached down and turned the tap. Water started spraying from the end of the hose, washing away the blood and fur that clung to Ray’s sneaker.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Drake said, more to himself than to his friend.
Ray, as was his style, didn’t say anything. He merely shrugged.
In Drake’s mind, he saw the squirrel’s eyes, those tiny black beads, go wide as the foot came down and crushed its skull, stamping out what was left of its life. He knew that this hadn’t really happened, the squirrel had no idea of its impending doom, and yet this image lodged itself in Drake’s mind.
After he was done washing his shoe, Ray brought the hose to his mouth for a drink. Then he offered it to Drake, who shook his head at first, then, tasting sour tuna on his lips, took it and rinsed his face.
“They were suffering,” Ray said at last. “I put them out of their misery.”
And then it was Drake’s turn to be quiet. He knew that what his friend was saying was true, and yet he couldn’t believe that Ray had actually done it; that he had actually killed the animal. It wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, it wasn’t like he had killed a person, and yet, that image—the image of the heel coming down and the sound and the wetness of it all—would haunt Drake for many nights to come.
After he was done with the water, Drake turned his eyes to the bright sun above.
It was coming on four in the afternoon, and the sun didn’t give any indication of easing its way into evening. The heat wave that had attacked New York all summer hadn’t as of yet given up its quest to melt the Earth.
Sweat trickled down Drake’s forehead and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“What do you want to do now?” Ray asked.
What Drake wanted to do was to go somewhere cool, somewhere inside. He must’ve glanced at the farmhouse then, because Ray shook his head, even though Drake hadn’t said anything.
“You know what dad said—he doesn’t want us going in there when he’s not around. You know, ‘cuz of my mom,” Ray said, lowering his eyes to the dirt.
Drake nodded.
He remembered the way that Mr. Reynolds had sat them both down when Drake had first arrived at the farm. He’d spoken briefly about Mrs. Reynolds, her sickness, and then had moved on to a set of rules for the next two weeks. Nothing too restrictive, just more of the same: if you go swimming, never go alone, no leaving the property, and stay out of the house as much as possible during the day. Two weeks was the longest Drake had stayed at the farm; if it had been up to him, he’d have stayed all summer. His first trip had just been a long weekend. The following year, it was a week. This year, it was two.