Cause of Death Page 4

  “Go over there by the couch, let me know if you can see it or not.”

  Drake backed up several paces, and as he did, he was amazed to see that the camera disappeared, blending into the wood, becoming a knot or other such imperfection in the natural surface.

  “Wow,” he said. “I wouldn’t even know it’s there.”

  “That’s kinda the point,” Screech said with a smile. He leaned forward and pressed a hidden button on the camera. A small red light came on, but then blinked out a second later.

  “There,” he said, hopping down from the chair. He proceeded to slap some of the dust off the dark green velvet cushion. “All set.”

  “That’s it?” Drake asked. It all seemed almost too easy.

  Too easy for ten grand, anyway.

  Screech tilted his head to one side and pushed his lips upward.

  “That’s it. Pass me your phone, and I’ll set it up.”

  Drake reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He handed it over, but Screech immediately handed it back.

  “The password.”

  Drake smiled and typed in the four-digit code to unlock it before handing it back.

  What had Chase said? Ten thousand possible combinations… Yeah, we should meet up again, Drake thought.

  Enough time had passed that being seen with him wouldn’t damage her career.

  Screech spent several minutes doing something with Drake’s phone tilted so that only he could see, before passing it back.

  “There you go,” he said. Drake looked down at his phone and was surprised to find that his screen had been divided into quadrants. The first three showed scenes from the house—the kitchen, office, and bedroom—while the fourth was showing both Screech and himself. Out of habit, Drake waved a hand in the air and watched as his digital representation mirrored his movements. The picture was crystal, pristine, and the delay was less than a second.

  “Shit, that’s pretty good,” he muttered to himself.

  “Should be, based on the price you paid for it,” Screech replied as he pushed the chair beneath a large dining table.

  Drake raised an eyebrow.

  “Do I want to know?”

  Screech laughed his high-pitched titter.

  “Nope. You don’t want to know. It’s better that way,” he paused and chewed his lip. “You really think that we’re going to get anything on camera?”

  Drake shrugged, remembering the die-hard certainty in Greta Armatridge’s voice the day prior.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, I guess. What matters is that Mrs. Armatridge keeps paying and we keep watching.”

  Screech nodded.

  “Speaking of which, I’m getting hungry. How ‘bout some breakfast? You’re paying.”

  ***

  Drake’s first instinct was to head to Patty’s, but he changed his mind at the last moment. He hadn’t been there since his final meeting with Ivan, and he was concerned that it would bring back memories that he would rather keep locked away.

  The finger bone in his pocket was reminder enough.

  Instead, he let Screech choose the breakfast joint.

  The man didn’t hesitate.

  “Oh, yeah, I know the perfect place,” he said with a smile.

  An apparent fondness for pancakes, and to Drake’s dismay, Screech chose a small, hole-in-the-wall cafe with a lineup that extended nearly all the way around the building. They only managed to get a seat because Screech was friendly with the owner—a massive, sweaty man with flour speckles coating nearly every inch of his body—who set them up at a makeshift table near the kitchen.

  Drake took a seat, as did Screech, and the waiter was at their side immediately.

  “Hey Screech, you want the usual?” the woman, who looked to be in her mid-fifties, asked between smacks of gum chewing.

  “But of course, Linda. And my friend here…” he looked over at Drake. “You like pancakes? Shit, of course you do. Everyone likes pancakes. Get him an order of the special—a stack of blueberry with a side of bacon. That suit you right?”

  “Sounds fine,” Drake said with a shrug. “And a black coffee.”

  The woman nodded and started to turn, when Drake reached out and touched her arm gently.

  “And a newspaper, if you have one.”

  “Sure thing,” she replied, and then to the kitchen she yelled. “Mark, Screech wants the special, and his friend wants a stack of blue with a side of hog.”

  Drake cringed at the intensity of her voice. When he turned back to Screech, he was surprised to see him smiling.

  “You know you can get the news on your phone.”

  “I know, but I’m a touchy feely kinda a guy.”

  Screech chuckled.

  “So long as you don’t get feely with me, I’m alright with that. And you’re going to love this place, by the way. As your namesake says, thank me later.”

  Chapter 9

  Beckett was halfway to his car after leaving Suzan before his phone started to ring. Normally set on silent, when he heard the BAD BOYZ theme song filter up to him, he immediately answered it.

  “Dr. Campbell,” he said.

  As usual, the voice that replied was curt, abrupt, and to the point.

  “There is an apparent suicide at 529 3rd Ave, Manhattan.”

  Beckett’s eyes shot up, and he glanced around. He was standing outside New York University Medical Center, and he was offered a clear view of the University and Tisch Hospital complex in the afternoon sky—bright, but also waning, like melting ice cream.

  He could almost see 3rd Ave from where he stood.

  “Say again? 3rd Avenue?”

  “Correct. Apparent suicide. The ME’s office said that you might be in the area, teaching a course at NYU. On scene officer reported it as cut and dry—a job for someone more junior—but if you are close.”

  Beckett hurried across the street, holding his hand out to slow several taxi cabs, and eventually made it to his car.

  “I’ll be there in ten,” he said, popping the trunk and retrieving his black case. 3rd Ave was so close that it made more sense just to walk.

  True to his word, Beckett arrived at the entrance of the high-rise apartment in under ten minutes.

  The front door was open, and a single police car was parked out front, the lights flashing.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary here; a suicide wouldn’t call for any pomp and circumstance, and an ambulance clearly wasn’t necessary.

  And yet Beckett had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Something’s wrong here.

  He had lost count of the number of crime scenes that he had been to during his tenure as a medical examiner, and he had seen some heinous things in his day, the least of which was a caterpillar jammed into a dead man’s mouth.

  Suicides? He had been to plenty of those, and now mostly deferred them to more junior colleagues. And yet… he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong here.

  Beckett swallowed hard and approached the door. As he did, a uniformed officer was in the process of exiting, and he halted Beckett’s forward progress.

  “Dr. Campbell, ME,” he said, holding up his black medical bag. The officer nodded and stepped aside.

  “Fair warning: there’s a hysterical friend of the deceased in there,” the officer said, cringing dramatically.

  As if on cue, a loud shriek followed him out of the apartment building.

  Beckett tilted his head as if to say, ‘welp, there she is,’ and then stepped through the door.

  He entered the foyer, noting several dozen shoes on a plastic rack off to one side. There was a staircase off to one side leading to apartments on the upper floors, but it was clear that the one that Beckett was interested in was on the main floor. The sheer number of students outside the open apartment door was an indication that it was likely a shared home for university students, especially given the proximity to campus.

  Beckett walked through this s
econd door and immediately saw two officers struggling to lift a hysterical blond-haired woman off the middle of the floor.

  “He didn’t commit suicide! He wouldn’t!” she cried in a shrill voice.

  One of the officers sensed his presence and turned to face him.

  ME, Beckett mouthed, and the police officer, a stern-faced man with a thin goatee, tilted his head to the left.

  Beckett nodded and quickly moved in that direction, hurrying so as not to be observed by the sobbing woman. Looking around as he made his way down a narrow hallway, he noted no obvious signs of a struggle. Sure, the walls were dinged, and there were dozens of dark finger smudges along their length, but this didn’t strike him as out of place in this house.

  During his medical degree, and for half of his pathology residency, Beckett had lived with three other men. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that they had been slobs. Incredibly busy slobs, but slobs nonetheless. They would let their mess and clutter build for an entire month. Then they would pool their money to hire a cleaning crew to come in and deal with it. They always made these arrangements over the phone, presenting themselves as responsible doctors who were just too darn busy saving lives to keep their abode clean.

  This worked… for a while. The cleaning crews would come and do what they could with the place, but when Beckett or one of the other tenants called the following month, they would get the ring around. Eventually, they exhausted the phone book of cleaning services. Their saving grace was that Beckett had just started a rotation with the ME’s office and spent half his time in the morgue. By sheer chance, he met a man several years his younger named Thomas Wilde, who was helping develop a process to obtain signatures from severely degraded DNA samples. At the time, Thomas was completing advanced degrees in both biochemistry and genetics, but he was also an entrepreneur. And one of his businesses just happened to be a crime scene clean-up company. Back then, Tom had been young and eager, and he had been keen to curry favor with Beckett and the ME’s office.

  In return for cleaning their apartment every month, Beckett would make sure to recommend him and his company for cleanup jobs after the ME cleared the scene. The two had quickly become friends—ironically, given how terrible the other cleaning services treated him—and to this day their friendship continued, while Tom’s company grew to become the main crime scene cleanup crew for all of New York City.

  This place wasn’t as bad as Beckett’s had been, but it was far from clean. Evidence would be difficult to discern from the refuse.

  Evidence? This is a suicide, Beckett, not murder.

  And yet the feeling in his gut that had first struck him in the entrance still ate away at him.

  There’s something wrong here.

  The first room Beckett came to had a strip of yellow crime scene tape draped across the opening, but this wasn’t what struck him first. That honor belonged to the smell, a mixture of stale piss and sour feces.

  It reminded him of a backed up toilet.

  Breathing through his mouth now, Beckett strode forward, ducking beneath the yellow tape.

  The bedroom was dark, the sole window covered with a sheet that only allowed the fading afternoon sun to penetrate in gray wisps. The bed was unmade, and the cheap particle board desk off to one side was covered with several textbooks, half of which lay open.

  A single ceiling tile lay broken on the carpet, causing Beckett to immediately look upward. In the gaping hole left by the missing tile, he spied a faded yellow rope wrapped around a water pipe buried in the ceiling.

  The other end was wrapped around a man’s neck.

  The corpse hung in the gray light, his back to the doorway. His body was stiff, indicating that rigor mortis had set in, giving Beckett a rough time of death of anywhere between eight and twenty-four hours. The man was wearing a pair of jeans, the back of which were dark when his bladder and bowels had let go in death.

  A fly buzzed somewhere in the corner of the room, drawn by the smell, which intensified as Beckett strode forward. The man was wearing his shoes, which Beckett thought strange, but not unheard of. After all, this was clearly the room of a student, a busy student at that, and busy students didn’t often consider the condition of the carpet when a final exam loomed.

  As he moved to the front of the corpse, Beckett continued to make mental notes. Starting at his shoes, untied he noted, his eyes slowly moved upward, observing the dark stain on the crotch, and the man’s plain, and surprisingly clean, white t-shirt.

  When his gaze fell on the man’s face, he paid attention to the foam at the corners of his mouth, the dark purple bruising around his neck. The man’s eyes were open and bulged slightly, petechial hemorrhaging giving him a concentrated freckle look that clearly didn’t belong.

  Only when Beckett took a step backward and appreciated the corpse’s face as a whole, did he finally come to realize why he was so struck with a sense of unease.

  A sound came out of his mouth then, something so foreign that he barely recognized it as of his own making.

  After more than a decade practicing medicine, and half as long working for the ME’s Office, Dr. Beckett Campbell audibly gasped at a crime scene for the very first time.

  Chapter 10

  “Can you believe this fucking guy?” Damien grumbled as he scanned the newspaper.

  “What?” Screech asked with a mouth full of pancakes. “Who’re you talking about?”

  Drake turned the paper around. Screech surveyed the front page, then went back to eating his pancakes.

  “So what?”

  Drake sipped his coffee and then turned the paper back around.

  The headline, in big bold type, read: Ken Smith has ten point lead in New York City Mayoral race.

  “So what? Seriously? This guy is a…” but Drake couldn’t find the right word to finish his sentence.

  What was Ken Smith, exactly?

  Drake’s initial inclination had been that the man was a monster, a heartless bastard driven by the only universal drive: power. But part of him refused to believe that; after all, he had been drunk that night when he had been invited into Ken’s condo, and he could have easily misread him.

  It wouldn’t be the first time; hadn’t he misread the Butterfly Killer so badly that it almost cost him another partner?

  “He’s what?” Screech asked. “A rich asshole? A pompous prick? A twisted bastard who’s using his son’s death to garner the sympathy vote?”

  Drake’s eyes darted up and again he was at a loss for words. Screech was turning out to be more astute than he had given him credit for.

  This was exactly what Drake felt, deep down, buried beneath a comforter of his own shame, his own guilt and inadequacies.

  Screech shrugged and took another bite of pancakes, dark blue syrup clinging to the corners of his lips.

  “Yep, he’s all of those things. But so what? Aren’t all politicians?”

  Drake thought about this for a moment before taking a bite of his own pancakes. Screech had been right; they were damn good.

  And he was also right about Ken Smith.

  He was all those things, but he was something else too.

  Drake found his hand subconsciously moving to his pocket, his fingers wrapping around the hard finger bone within.

  He was also a man of resources.

  “You alright? I didn’t mean to offend,” said Screech.

  Drake pulled his hand from his pocket, leaving the finger bone inside and shook his head.

  It’s not my problem anymore. I’ve said my piece, I’ve atoned for my sins. It’s time to move on.

  “Naw, it’s fine—you’re right. Good pancakes, by the way.”

  “The best,” Screech said with a swallow. “Hey, let me ask you something… do you miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  “Being a cop. I mean, I’m guessing that someone your age might get a kick out of watching Mrs. Armatridge’s bedroom, but it has to pale in comparison to what you’re used to, doesn’t it?” Scr
eech asked with a smirk.

  The question caught Drake by surprise. He had hired Screech solely based on his technical skill set, his expertise with everything electronic. Long ago, back when he had been working the New York streets as a beat cop, Drake learned that the most common mistake in the field was that most people partnered up with others that were most similar to them. An ego trip if there ever was one; surrounding yourself with ‘yes’ men and bobbleheads. Sure it made you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but this approach was a recipe for disaster. It was best to work with others that complemented your skills, not reinforced them, he knew. Clay, for instance, had been the cool, calm and collected yin to his yang. Level-headed. Able to deal with the likes of Sergeant Rhodes, whereas Drake just liked to bash heads.

  Chase had been more like him, but she had a way of speaking to people, himself included, that made them comfortable enough to open up, without them even knowing.

  And at Triple D Investigations, Screech was the computer wizard, someone who had the requisite know-how to set up teeny tiny cameras to record people’s private lives. Drake had worked with Screech for the better part of six months now, and in all that time they hadn’t so much as shared what their favorite color was, let alone anything intimate.

  Which had suited Drake just fine.

  Now, however, over a stack of delicious pancakes—Screech’s favorite food, evidently—it was clear that the man was looking to open up.

  Drake swallowed his pancakes and gnawed the inside of his lip.

  “No,” he lied, locking his eyes on Screech’s.

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  “No?”

  Drake felt as if the man was peering into him, and when he felt his face flush, it was he who finally looked away.

  Why lie? What’s the point of lying?

  “Sometimes,” he said in a small voice. “Sometimes I miss it. But that part of my life is behind me. It’s about Triple D now, about carving out a small living for myself.”

  This answer seemed to satisfy Screech as he nodded, and went back to scarfing his pancakes. Drake did the same, but with slightly less enthusiasm than before.