Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 5
She had made the same face moments before they had “started-over”; she was torn between two options, two frames of mind.
It was a place Drake had been many times during his career. Detective Adams was sandwiched between following the rules and solving a case.
“Promise me something,” she said at last.
“What?”
Chase reached out with surprising quickness and snatched the phone from his hand.
“That when your ship goes down in flames, you give me enough time to abandon ship. That seem fair?”
Drake smiled wryly.
“Ay, ay, Captain. Or do you prefer boss?”
Chase frowned and turned her attention to the cell phone. She turned it over, running her fingers over the Apple emblem on the back.
“Tell me something… how’d you plan to unlock the phone once it’s charged?”
Now it was Drake’s turn to show his displeasure on his face.
“Unlock it? What do you mean, unlock it?”
Chase raised her eyes to look at him.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
She shook her head disapprovingly.
“You really are a dinosaur, aren’t you?” she pulled her own cell phone out of her pocket, and Drake recognized that it was nearly identical to the one he had taken from the vic.
Charger? Check.
She swiped the screen and showed it to him. He saw what appeared to be a grid of numbers.
“Everyone locks their phone these days,” she said simply. “You need a four-digit code to get in.”
Drake’s heart sunk.
“Well, how many combinations can there be?”
“Lemme see: ten numbers, zero to nine, four digits… oh, what is ten thousand, Alex.”
Drake’s eyes bulged.
“Ten thousand?”
Chase nodded.
“Ten thousand.”
Drake grunted.
“Really.”
“For real.”
“Then you get your wish: I’m going to drop it into evidence after all,” he said, reaching for the phone.
But Chase pulled it back and he looked up at her, confusion washing over him.
This woman was messing with his head.
And now she was smiling.
“What now?”
“There are ten thousand combinations and we’re never going to guess it. I don’t even think the phone will let you do something like 1-2-3-4 anymore, or just the same number four times.”
Drake frowned.
“Yeah, I get it; fine. Then why are you smiling?”
“Well, because you can either put in the code or… this is an iPhone 7.”
He shrugged.
“So?”
“So, you can also open it with a fingerprint.”
He suddenly realized what she was getting at, and was beginning to think that maybe she was going to be a helpful partner after all. Chase was no replacement for Clay, no one was, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a few tricks up her sleeve.
And now he was smiling. Drake opened his mouth to say something, when his own phone started to ring in his pocket, a loud, obnoxious bleep bleep bleep.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an ancient Nokia phone.
“Drake,” he said and then listened. Thirty seconds later, he added, “Yep, good. We’re on our way.”
Then he tucked the phone back into his pocket and smirked at the confused expression on Chase’s face.
Without saying anything, he started toward the door.
“Let’s go,” he said at last.
Chase blocked his path.
“You going to tell me who was on the phone, Zach Morris? Was it your pal AC Slater calling from nineteen-ninety-four?”
Drake had no idea who she was referring to, but answered anyway.
“That, Chase, was our man with the fingerprint; that was Beckett Campbell, and he wants us to visit him in the morgue. That okay with you, boss?”
Chapter 10
“Hypercytokinemia,” Beckett said as he pointed at the swollen red area on the vic’s neck.
“Hyper what?” Drake asked, staring stupidly at the ME. Usually Beckett spoke like a human, but in the past six months since they had seen each other, the man seemed to have reverted to the inane medical lingo that only a select few could even pretend to understand.
But then Drake realized that the doctor wasn’t even looking at him, but at her.
He’s trying to impress her, he realized with a hint of a smile.
“Look, Beckett, you’re going to need to translate,” he indicated himself and Chase, “neither of us graduated cum laude from—”
“Cytokine storm,” Chase interrupted as she moved next to Beckett to inspect the wound herself.
“A what? Jesus, do either of you guys speak English? And you,” he said to Chase, “In all of your twelve years of life, did you happen to go to med school during your seven years as a narc in Seattle? Moonlight as a pathologist, did you?”
Chase laughed, but instead of answering, she lowered her head and observed the vic more closely.
“No, no med school, I’m afraid. But there was this case once at a clinical trial facility where seven people died from what was supposed to be some simple test for a generic version of a headache medicine.”
“Ok, great, so Dr. Quinn, care to explain what happened here?”
It was Beckett who answered, his voice again transitioning to a professional air that was foreign to Drake.
Oh, he’s laying it on thick now.
“Basically an uncontrolled allergic reaction—a positive feedback loop of cytokines—err, immune molecules that cause the body to produce massive inflammation. In this case, our vic’s lungs swelled so much that he couldn’t breathe.”
Drake remembered the lack of disruption in the sand around the man’s mouth when he had laid face down in the crack den. At the time, he had thought that he was dead before he hit the ground, but now he couldn’t be so sure.
“So what caused it?”
Beckett pointed at the swelling on the man’s neck which Chase continued to inspect as if she expected words to rise out of the man’s skin, perhaps revealing the killer’s name.
Or even the victim’s.
“Injection—still running tests, but it looks like it was a concentrated insect slurry. And,” now he pointed at the bloody butterfly on his back, “given the killer’s choice of artwork and our furry friend we found in his mouth, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on a butterfly.”
Drake was still listening, but he had lowered the man’s volume inside his head after he had said the words insect slurry.
A shudder ran through him.
“So, this man was, what? Killed by injecting a butterfly—” he couldn’t bring himself to say the word slurry, “—parts? Then the killer drew a butterfly in blood on his back. Wait, is it blood?”
Drake half expected Beckett to spout another medical term that he didn’t understand, but was pleasantly surprised when he simply nodded.
“Yes, but not the vic’s.”
Drake processed this for a moment.
“So he has a butterfly drawn in someone else’s blood on his back. What about the caterpillar?”
“Put in there post-mortem. So far as I can tell, it didn’t really do anything. Just hung out there until we arrived. Oh, and one more thing, the blood on his back? It’s from a female.”
“Oi,” Drake said without thinking. His face flushed slightly when Chase looked at him with a curious expression. “A woman?”
“A woman,” Beckett confirmed.
New narratives started playing out in his mind. In his experience, this type of crime was rarely committed by a woman.
A scorned lover, perhaps?
But then why the whole charade, why was the man running from her in the alley?
It certainly didn’t feel or even look like some sort of demented crime of passion.
“Definitely not,” Chase agreed when he was finished. She turned to Beckett. “Did you send blood samples to the lab for DNA analysis?”
Beckett confirmed that he had.
“They are backlogged to shit, though. Could be months, and even then we’ll only get something if the person’s blood is in the system. Seems like a longshot. I mean, someone who goes about making a butterfly slurry and carries around Monarch caterpillars doesn’t seem like they would make a dumb enough to leave their DNA at the scene, do they?”
“Great, another detective,” Drake grumbled with a hint of sarcasm.
Beckett held up his hands.
“Just trying to help, Columbo. Just trying to help.”
“Speaking of which,” Drake said, moving forward. “I was hoping that our vic might be able to do just that—well, maybe not lend a hand so much as a finger.”
Beckett squinted at him and looked about to answer when Chase produced the cell phone from her pocket. Beckett turned to her.
“The vic’s?”
She nodded.
“We just need to charge the thing first,” Drake said.
Chase smiled and pressed the button near the bottom of the screen. It lit up, showing the same number pattern that she had shown him on her cell back in his office.
“Already did,” she said.
“What? How?”
“Charged it in the car.”
Drake held up his hands as if to say where the hell was I?
Beckett took the phone in a gloved hand and then pulled one of the victim’s arms off the table. Without saying a word, he extended the man’s index finger, rubbed it briefly, then placed it on the button. A second later, Drake saw the screen change.
Behind a background of icons, he saw an image of their vic, smiling, his arms wrapped around a pretty blond woman and a white-haired boy.
Chase suddenly drew a sharp intake of breath, and Beckett looked like he might be sick.
“What? What is it? Do you know this guy?” Drake asked.
Chase nodded and he saw her jaw clench.
“Yes,” she said in an airy whisper. “And you should, too.”
Chapter 11
“Thomas Alexander Smith,” Chase said softly, spinning the newspaper around for him to see. “I didn’t recognize him when he was lying on the ground, and at the morgue I was too busy looking at his swollen neck. But on his phone…” she let her sentence trail off and Drake turned his attention to the article from the finance section of the New York Times.
At the top of the half-page article was a photograph of their vic, smiling with perfect teeth, a comically large pair of scissors in his hands poised to cut a ribbon. Flanking him were two well-dressed men that looked important enough for Drake to know them, although he didn’t.
Thomas Smith cuts the ceremonial ribbon at the inauguration of the NYC Library that now bears his family name.
Drake swallowed hard, and as he continued to read, he said.
“Yeah, so you know when I said that the press was going to have a field day? Well, fuck, they’re not going to have a field day, they’re going to go on a goddamn month-long field trip.”
“No kidding,” Chase said quietly.
They were two of maybe a half-dozen patrons in the small diner that Chase had led him to after leaving Beckett back at the morgue. She had held her tongue the entire time they had driven here and then had rooted through the stack of newspapers near the front of Patty’s Diner. As she had predicted, they had several from earlier in the week, including one from four days ago, which she showed to him now.
Drake’s eyes darted around quickly, making sure that no one was within earshot, and then read the first few lines to her.
“Thomas Smith, of the prominent New York Law Firm, Smith, Smith, and Jackson, is well known to the community in which he grew up. A caring and giving philanthropist, Thomas and his family’s firm have given more than five million dollars over the past decade. However, this donation to save a library, the land on which it stands aggressively being sought by developers, is Thomas’s largest single donation to date, topping 1.2 million.”
The waitress suddenly appeared, and Drake stopped speaking and folded the paper over as if he were reading a dirty magazine.
She gave him a look and then turned to Chase.
“Would you like some coffee, dear?”
For a split-second, Drake thought that she was going to order a strange tea, or a non-fat soy latte, hold the sprinkles, and he was going to have to start hating her again.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she said, “Please. Black.”
The woman nodded and flipped over the porcelain cup and filled it. Then she turned to Drake.
“And you?”
Now it was his turn to hesitate. What he desperately wanted was a coffee with an ounce of whiskey in it, and was about to order it too when he remembered what Chase had said to him when they had first met.
Don’t ever drink before coming to a crime scene again.
Although Patty’s Diner didn’t exactly qualify as a crime scene, he wasn’t in the mood to test her. But he did need something; his buzz from the Johnny miniatures had long since faded, and he could feel his body start to cry out for more.
“Coffee and a water. And do you have any cheesecake? Pie?”
Chase raised an eyebrow at this, but he ignored her.
The waitress sighed as if his request had tipped the scales of boredom.
“Key Lime? Cherry? Strawberry-rhubarb? What about—”
“Whatever’s freshest,” he said quickly, making it clear that he wanted to be left alone again. The woman’s thin lips pressed together and she spun on her heels without another word.
Without filling his coffee either, he noticed.
“You just make friends everywhere you go, don’t you?”
Drake ignored the comment and instead rolled up the newspaper.
“Mind if I take this?” he asked holding it up.
Chase shrugged.
“It’s not mine.”
Good point, Drake thought.
The waitress returned with his pie and a glass of water. When he inquired about the coffee, she said that they were making a fresh pot. He considered asking why she hadn’t filled his coffee when she had served Chase, but was dissuaded by her stern expression.
Instead, he pointed at the pie.
“Strawberry-rhubarb?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Key Lime,” she said and then turned back toward the kitchen.
Drake used his fork to lift the yellowish whipped cream and spied the pink interior filling. He furrowed his brow.
“Your freshest, huh.”
Chase took a sip of her coffee.
“I’m beat—gonna get some rest. I’ll Google Smith when I get home, see what I can find out if he wasn’t the perfect citizen he appears to be. You’d be surprised what you can find out just by doing a little Internet digging.”
Drake, his concentration fixed on what looked like an artificial strawberry in his pie, said, “What about the family? Want to notify the family?”
Chase shook her head.
“I’ll put a call into missing persons, but I asked them to contact me directly after we found the body if anyone puts in a report in the meantime. Nobody has yet, so I guess it can wait until morning. It is odd, though, that his wife didn’t call. I mean, they have a young child.”
Chase pulled out the vic’s cell phone as she said this.
“A lot of good that’ll do,” Drake remarked. “I mean, you can’t exactly keep going back to Beckett every time you want to open it.”
Chase smiled.
“I changed the passcode.”
Drake finally put his fork down and lifted an eyebrow.
“To what?”
Chase didn’t reply right away. Instead, she stood and stretched her back.
“Ten thousan
d combinations, Drake. Ten thousand.”
And then she smiled and left the diner.
When she was gone, Drake chuckled to himself. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad working with Chase after all.
He broke off a piece of the pie with his fork, which took considerable pressure, and then grimaced before putting it into his mouth.
It was strawberry-rhubarb for fuck’s sake.
Drake raised his hand and craned his neck around. The waitress looked over at him, her face pinched so tightly that the thick grooves around her mouth resembled a relief map of the Grand Canyon.
“Hey Broomhilda, bring me a shot of your best whiskey with that coffee, will you?”
Chapter 12
“It’s not him,” Drake said, a hint of frustration creeping into his voice.
“It is, Drake. I don’t know why you are being so stubborn about this—it’s him; we finally got him,” Clay replied, his eyes still trained on the road.
Drake shook his head.
“Seven bodies reduced to bones, a crown made of finger bones from all other victims cemented to the top of their skulls like some sort of demented crown, and you think that this case has been solved by a simple wiretap? You think that the Skeleton King would give himself away that easily?”
Clay scratched at his beard and gave Drake a disapproving look.
“Skeleton King? Really? For someone who detests the media as much as you do, you seem to have really taken to the moniker, haven’t you?”
Now it was Drake’s turn to look away.
Seven bodies in seven days. People that were never reported missing. Drifters, carefully selected victims that wouldn’t raise alarm. And on the last, a single piece of hair with just enough of a follicle to get a DNA profile. Next comes the wiretap, then the all incriminating telephone call placed to… who? His mother of all people?
No, Drake was positive that this man, that Peter Kellington, was not the Skeleton King.
“This is a waste of fucking time,” he grumbled.
Clay sighed heavily and the car lurched as they started toward Peter Kellington’s home address. They had managed to get a drop on the beat cops, but they couldn’t be more than five minutes behind. If it were up to Drake, he would just allow them to bust down the door while he was back at the station following up with some real leads.