Butterfly Kisses Read online

  “Unknown.”

  As they walked, Drake was keenly observing his surroundings, trying to piece together what had happened. The alley was narrow, devoid of street lights. A place to be avoided by a man wearing six or eight hundred dollar shoes. Clinton Hill was known for its junkies and the occasional prostitute, but mostly the former.

  Alligator shoes was a new one for him.

  “Is the medical examiner on the way?”

  Chase nodded.

  “A senior medical examiner by the name of… Dr. Beckett Campbell? Yeah, I think that’s it. You know him?”

  Something happened to Drake’s face then, something so foreign that at first he thought he was stricken by some sort of palsy. But after a moment, he realized what it was: a hint of a smile.

  Beckett was young, with bleach blond hair and tattoos covering both arms, which Drake suspected extended to his back and chest too, although he hadn’t had the opportunity to confirm.

  Beckett Campbell was pretty much the antithesis of Drake himself, but maybe that’s why he appreciated the man as he did. That, and Beckett had a way of speaking that made Drake feel like he had been to medical school, and not a fucking idiot who squeaked through high school by the thinnest of margins. In fact, it was probably this attitude and approach that had made Beckett so amenable to both his peers and to homicide, which had in turn more than likely contributed to his rapid rise to Senior Medical Examiner.

  “Yeah, I know him. Good guy. Better doctor.”

  Drake allowed his eyes to drift as he spoke. The alley was long and narrow, flanked on one side by a chain-link fence, and a row of buildings on the other. There were doors marking the building, all of them handleless and flush with the brick wall, mostly as a deterrent to burglars, although Drake hadn’t an idea what a potential robber would hope to steal here.

  All the doors looked the same, except for the red one that he didn’t need his detective skills to know that they were headed towards. That one was covered by yellow crime scene tape.

  “Who discovered the body?” he asked, eyes drifting to the windows that started ten or more feet up, all of which were covered with bars.

  “A junkie—Rachel Adams, no relation.”

  Drake waited for her to continue, but when she offered nothing else, he prodded. It was like pulling teeth.

  He shook his head and resolved himself to starting over.

  “Look, Chase, I think—”

  Chase suddenly stopped and turned to look at him. He expected coldness based on the abruptness of the maneuver, but was surprised by the solemn, almost sad expression on what he now conceded wasn’t just a face, but a pretty face.

  “Damien—”

  “Please, just call me Drake.”

  She raised an eyebrow as if to say, oh, so now we’re chummy, but then the look vanished.

  “Okay, Drake. I just want to let you know that I’m not here to replace Clay. I heard that you guys were close, and I’m sorry to hear about what happened to him. I know…” her eyes became vacant for a moment, then she shook her head briefly. “I just want to solve this crime, and move on to the next, you know?”

  Drake nodded and then surprised himself by holding out his hand. She looked at it, and he instantly recognized the expression.

  It was the same one that he had given Chase when she had offered her hand to shake. But unlike him, she grabbed his and pumped it twice.

  Her hand was soft and strangely cool to the touch despite the sun beating down on them. Drake went to pull his hand away, but she held firm, and then drew him closer. The act, as well as the strength in her small frame, surprised him.

  “And don’t drink next time you come to my crime scene, alright?”

  Drake’s eyes bulged slightly, and he looked away, feeling his ears go hot again. Chase released her grip and a smile returned to her face.

  Then she turned and continued down the alley, and Drake followed.

  CHAPTER 5

  “So the tweeker Rachel called it in?”

  Chase nodded, lifting the police tape across the red door and gesturing for Drake to enter. He hesitated.

  “After you.”

  Another eyebrow raise, but Chase made no move to enter.

  Drake shrugged.

  Chivalry really is dead.

  He crossed the threshold first.

  “Yes,” Chase answered, following him inside. “She’s down at the station now giving an official statement. Said that last night around three am, she was awoken by someone pounding on the back door, yelling to open up.”

  Drake’s shoes crunched on the ground and he looked down. It appeared as if someone had laid a thick layer of sand across what he thought might be concrete.

  “And she did?”

  Chase nodded.

  “She opened the door, then says that our vic pushed by her and went inside. Said he looked scared, eyes red, like he had been crying, maybe. Could have just been the rain though.”

  Drake remembered the drying puddles in the alley outside.

  “And then what?”

  “Rachel says someone bopped her over the head, and she was knocked out cold. Woke up in the alley a few hours later, came inside and found the body.”

  Drake cocked his head.

  “She said that the man knocked at three and she was out cold for an hour or two… so why are we only getting here at—” he checked his Timex, “eleven-thirty?”

  “She says she was scared, didn’t know what to do.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Rachel Adams is well known to the police—the uniform that took her to the station had arrested her twice himself: once for possession of crystal, the other for soliciting. The way I figure it, is that she needed to clean up some of her product before calling it in.”

  Drake thought about this for a moment.

  “Which would explain why she opened the door at three am instead of calling the uniforms right away. Probably expecting a custy or a delivery. She mention that she was waiting for someone? Her pimp? A dealer?”

  Chase reached over to a small box on the floor and pulled out blue shoe covers. After putting them overtop of her flats, she offered a pair to Drake. He took them and slid them over his worn loafers.

  “That’s what I was thinking. But no pimp. Uniforms say that she just turned tricks on her own in order to score—wasn’t a regular thing. A dealer makes more sense.”

  Drake bit his lip.

  “Did you ID the vic?”

  Chase shook her head.

  “No wallet.”

  “Hmm. Give the station a call, get them to question her about a wallet. If she was turning tricks to score some dope, I wouldn’t put it by her to steal a dead man’s wallet.”

  Chase stared at him for a moment, and Drake looked back, confusion washing over him. When her eyes darted to the radio on his belt, he realized why.

  “Sorry,” he grumbled. “It’s just that Clay was always the one to call things in. We can talk to her directly when we get back to the station.”

  Chase reached for her radio, and unclicked it.

  “That’s alright, I’ll let them know to hold her until we come in.”

  While she made the call, Drake looked around.

  They were in what appeared to be some sort of warehouse. One of the officers had set up a bright light in the corner, which cast the entire space in an artificial glow with hard shadows.

  He guessed the main room was eighteen to twenty feet long, but only about ten feet wide. The sand on the ground was disturbed in many places, and he saw long, flat depressions at regular intervals.

  It was a crack den, he was sure of it; the deep indents were from people sleeping on the floor. Toward the back of half of the room was a white plastic sheet that ran floor to ceiling, behind which he could make out the bright halos of other lights.

  There were several used condoms on the floor and a smashed bong by one wall, all of which had yellow tags with numbers on them placed beside each ite
m. There were two uniforms inside the warehouse, and perhaps more behind the plastic curtain based on the shadows he noted within; one was busy taking pictures of the paraphernalia, while the other had his nose buried in his cell phone.

  He kicked at the sand with his covered shoe. Then he turned to Chase, who had since reclipped her radio to her hip.

  “Not going to find any usable footprints here,” he said. “What’s with the sand?”

  Chase started to walk toward the plastic curtain.

  “Junkies lay it down,” she paused. “You ever see someone deep in a k-hole?”

  Drake shook his head. He was familiar with the concept: essentially, if you injected enough Ketamine, your brain would completely disconnect from your body and you were lost in a sort of void.

  The k-hole.

  “Well, sometimes if you go deep enough, you can shit or piss yourself and not even know it.”

  Drake screwed up his face, and then leaned down and adjusted the boot coverings so that they covered his entire loafers.

  “So this is like some sort of kitty litter for crack addicts?”

  “Something like that.”

  When Drake continued to look at her, she raised a hand defensively.

  “What can I say? Worked as a Narc in Seattle for seven years.”

  Again, Drake was taken aback by this comment.

  Seven years? She can’t be older than… what? Thirty-three? Thirty-five at most?

  Chase looked away, clearly uncomfortable now.

  “Anyways, there’s something else you are going to want to see.”

  Drake had a feeling that this was coming.

  “The reason why our vic was shirtless?”

  Chase smiled.

  “Bingo,” she replied, then pulled back the curtain, revealing the crime scene.

  CHAPTER 6

  The man lay face down, his arms and legs bound behind his back by a single length of rope. There was a worn chair off to one side, and on it were laid a shirt and suit jacket, both of which looked to be draped with care as if to avoid wrinkles.

  The man’s back was bare, and on it was a crude, almost child-like image of a butterfly painted in a dark brown substance. The body of the butterfly, a simple, sausage like shape with two projections near the top, ran nearly the length of the man’s spine, and the wings, two ‘B’ shapes, one backward, extended to his shoulder blades.

  “A butterfly,” Drake muttered unintentionally. This, he had not been expecting.

  “A butterfly,” Chase repeated. “Can’t confirm it yet, but it appears to be drawn in blood.”

  As Drake processed this information, he moved closer to the body. The uniformed police officer stepped aside to allow him access.

  The blood, if that was indeed what it was, didn’t appear to have come from the man’s back. In fact, aside from the drawing, his flesh appeared unmarked.

  Drake moved closer still, stepping near the man’s head and crouching on his haunches.

  The vic’s eyes were open, and what he suspected were hazel irises had turned a slight milky color in death. He was clean shaven, and his hair had recently been cut—short, professional.

  His pale lips were open slightly.

  “He was placed here after he was already dead,” he stated matter-of-factly.

  Chase appeared beside him.

  “How can you tell?”

  Drake reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pen, and then used it to indicate the area around the victim’s mouth.

  “See here? The sand is the same height as the rest of the area around the body. If he had still been breathing, his breath would have blown it away.”

  Drake squinted hard. In moving his pen around, he noticed what looked like a small amount of dirt at the corner of the man’s mouth, which didn’t fit with his otherwise manicured appearance. He got the impression that this was the type of man who would be mortified if caught with a piece of spinach lodged between two perfectly white teeth.

  He moved the pen toward the man’s face.

  “It looks like—”

  But the sound of the curtain being drawn back gave him pause.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Drake, my man. You should know better than to touch the body before a doctor is in the house.”

  Drake turned to see Beckett moving toward him, his shock of white blond hair spiked high atop his head. He was grinning, showing off a winning smile.

  Drake stood.

  “You’re not a real doctor.”

  The man shrugged.

  “That’s right, I only play one on TV,” he turned to Chase next. “And who’s this?”

  Chase extended her hand.

  “Chase Adams, Homicide.”

  He shook her hand, a short and perfunctory process, unlike his own experience, then turned to the body on the ground.

  “Beckett Campbell, at your service.”

  He whistled loudly.

  “Butterfly, huh?”

  In one fluid motion, he pulled a set of purple lab gloves from the pocket of his leather jacket—how many doctors wear leather jackets, Drake wondered—and slipped them on.

  “I think there’s something in his mouth, dirt maybe,” Drake offered.

  Beckett held up a finger.

  “In time, my friend. In time.”

  He straddled the victim’s body, and then closed his eyes as if in some sort of trance.

  Chase moved forward.

  “We think the vic died—”

  Beckett sucked in a deep breath and waved his arms dramatically.

  “Silence while I do my work.”

  Drake rolled his eyes, and Chase looked over at him. He shrugged and turned back to the charade.

  Beckett squatted over the man, looking as if he was going to sit on his back, and then gently prodded his ribs with two fingers. Apparently satisfied, he moved his hands upward, ending at the base of the man’s neck. After cradling his head briefly, Beckett stood straight, and then stepped over the body, moving toward where Drake had been moments ago.

  Before he crouched, he turned to Chase, still beaming.

  “I was only kidding. You can talk as much as you want.”

  Chase said nothing, and her face gave away less, and Beckett shrugged.

  “No external injuries as far as I can tell,” Drake offered.

  Beckett gestured toward a small black bag that he had set down after entering the curtain. Drake fetched it for him and then the coroner withdrew what looked like a scalpel missing the blade.

  “No, no external injuries. Except, of course, the injection site near his neck.”

  Drake grimaced.

  “The what?”

  “The injection site. Small pinprick on the left side of his neck. Little red dot, you know?”

  Drake, incredulous, walked over to that side and hunched down low.

  As he did, Beckett asked Chase for an evidence container.

  And there it was, something so small that Drake couldn’t really blame himself for having overlooked it. A tiny red dot on the man’s otherwise flawless skin.

  “Area still looks a little puffy,” Beckett continued. “Must have been some pretty serious inflammation to have lasted for… what? Eight hours since he died?”

  Chase confirmed the timeline.

  “Damn, I’m good,” Beckett muttered. “Oh, and there’s also this.”

  Drake moved to the other side of the body again, and watched as Beckett eased the metal device into the man’s mouth and used it to push his lips to one side like a dentist attempting to clean his molars.

  And that’s when Drake saw it: a flicker of movement, a dark shape wriggling toward the back of the victim’s teeth.

  Drake felt his stomach lurch, and now regretted the second bottle of whiskey.

  And the third.

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “No, not him, I’m afraid,” Beckett replied. “Unless Our Lord and Savior was reincarnated as a caterpillar.”

  As the dark form wriggl
ed completely out of the man’s mouth, Drake looked away. His eyes fell on Chase, and he was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one who was feeling queasy.

  Beckett brought the plastic specimen container close to the victim’s face, and then put his tool in front of the caterpillar. The insect crawled on top of it, which Beckett used to put it in the specimen container. After screwing the lid closed, he put it in a clear plastic bag and held it out to Drake.

  “Looks like your killer has a thing for butterflies,” Beckett said, hooking a chin toward the corpse. “But I guess you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Here’s what we know,” Drake said to the half dozen detectives standing in the conference room before him. “A man in his mid-thirties, dead via some sort of injection—tox report should be back this afternoon or tomorrow morning by the latest. Our victim appears affluent, but without ID.”

  He saw several eyebrows rise.

  “His body was found in an abandoned warehouse on Luther Street in Clinton Hill. But he was a non-drug user, so far as we can tell. Again, tox will clear that up. This was no opportunist crime; this was cold and calculated. I want to know why this man was in Clinton Hill, if anyone in the local bar scene saw him around that night. Right now, it’s just an informal question and answer situation. We will be meeting every morning at 8 am until the case is solved.”

  Someone groaned at this, and Drake pushed his lips together tightly.

  Some things apparently never changed.

  “And based on the presumed status of the victim, we want to keep the media out of this for as long as possible. As soon as they catch wind of this, they are going to be all over it. Mark my words on that.”

  Drake paused for a moment, surveying the faces of men and women in the room. He knew all of them, of course, as they had all been here before… before the incident. But the faces of these people, ones that he had known for decades in some cases, seemed different to him.

  Only, it wasn’t their faces, per se, but the way they looked at him. He saw something that he never thought he would in their cold eyes, their flat expressionless mouths: disdain.

  Disdain and anger.

  He swallowed hard.

  “I’m sure you’ve all heard about the butterfly; I can confirm that there was a butterfly drawn in blood on the vic’s back. When canvassing Clinton Hill, keep your eyes and ears open for anything that might be related to insects—butterflies in particular.”