Shaken (Jacqueline Jack Daniels Mysteries) [Plus Bonus Content] Page 6

  With the ball gag in my mouth, the only way I could breathe was through my nostrils. A stuffy nose could kill me.

  So I rested, keeping still, trying to calm down enough so I could regain control over my emotions. I’d never felt so along before. The only company I had was the unknown machine humming in the background, and my thoughts and memories.

  It would have been okay if there were some good memories mixed with the bad.

  Unfortunately, my head was filled with bad stuff that refused to fade away.

  Most of the bad stuff revolved around my career. I’d chased, and caught, my share of human monsters. But catching them, or even killing them, didn’t bring their victims back. It also didn’t make me sleep any better at night.

  Before my recent retirement, I’d almost called it quits several times. I never did, but I had come pretty close. In my never-ending quest to prove myself to my coworkers, I’d endured a lot of sexist and chauvinist attitudes. A lot of male cops didn’t think women had what it took to work Homicide. It was too ugly for their delicate sensibilities.

  In my opinion, it was too ugly for anyone’s sensibilities, female or not, delicate or not. But the fact was, women did have a definite disadvantage when working violent crime cases. It didn’t have to do with physical brawn or stronger stomachs. It had to do with empathy.

  Women in general had the ability to feel the emotions of others. Pain in particular.

  I’d seen a lot of pain in my years on the force. It was tough to handle.

  Coming upon some horrific crime scene, seeing what some psycho had done to a fellow human being, was difficult for me to cope with. Because I could put myself in their place.

  I could see their last moments. The struggling. The fighting. The final breath. I could hear their pleas for mercy. I could feel their fear, their agony, sense their helplessness, imagine their horror so deeply it had led to a lifetime of nightmares. That is, when I could get to sleep at all.

  Thinking back over the victims I’d encountered, two stood out as the absolute worst ways a person could die. Both were at the merciless hands of Mr. K.

  One was known as the Guinea Worm.

  The other, the Catherine Wheel.

  Lying there in the storage locker, eyes closed, I couldn’t help but shudder at the horrible images they induced.

  I also couldn’t help but wonder what was making that ominous humming noise next to me.

  Three years ago

  2007, August 8

  When backup arrived at Merle’s U-Store-It, there was more vomiting, every time someone new showed up. I got wise and pulled a garbage can over to the scene, but that was about the only wise thing I’d done that day. Even Phil Blasky, who had a stomach made of titanium and could often be seen eating lunch while doing an autopsy, flinched when he saw the body.

  “He’s been here at least three days,” Blasky said during his cursory examination. “Maybe longer. He’s wearing an adult diaper. Got two healing IV marks on his arm, where the needle pulled out from the spinning.”

  According to Blasky, Mr. K had visited the vic at least three times, to change his IV bag, keeping him hydrated and alive during the terrible agony he’d endured.

  “Tripod probably held a camcorder,” Herb said. “Or maybe a camera taking time-lapse photos. Gives some cred to the theory that Mr. K is a hit man.”

  I nodded. When the Outfit ordered an execution, they often wanted proof. A picture was a nice memento to keep around to remind you what you did to your enemies. Both Herb and I had worked cases before where videotapes were involved, but those were sex murders. This death didn’t appear to have a sexual element. This was about causing as much pain as possible.

  The particular torture Mr. K employed dated back to medieval times, where it was known as the Catherine Wheel. It resembled a circus knife-throwing act, where someone was strapped to a large, round board, spread-eagled, and then spun in circles while knives hit the spaces between their limbs. But in this case, there were no thrown knives. The pain came from broken limbs—the victim’s arms and legs were each fractured in several places.

  For seventy-two hours, a small electric motor had spun him slowly around, his compound fractures stretching and rubbing together, until his arms and legs were so swollen they looked like they’d been inflated.

  I couldn’t imagine a more horrible way to die.

  “Nothing at all. Not a damn thing.” Officer Scott Hajek, from the crime scene team, frowned at me. He couldn’t find a single shred of evidence anywhere, inside or outside the unit. No fingerprints. No footprints. Even the floor had been swept prior to our arrival. Mr. K didn’t leave anything behind.

  “Jack, I’d like to talk when you have a sec.”

  I glanced at Herb, whose fat jowls were hanging down like a basset hound’s. Then I nodded and walked him down the hallway.

  “I left my post,” he said when we were far enough away from the others. “You told me to wait downstairs and watch the exit.”

  “Herb…”

  “I screwed up, Jack. If you want to lodge a formal reprimand—”

  “I don’t want to lodge a reprimand. Forget about it, Herb.”

  He stared at me, pained. I tried to keep my face neutral. Because it wasn’t Herb’s fault. He’d come to my aid when I didn’t respond. I was the one who should have exercised some control, told my partner the perp was on his way down.

  It wasn’t Herb’s fault Mr. K got away.

  It was mine.

  And I deserved more than a reprimand. For letting that monster escape, I felt I deserved to have my badge taken away.

  “Let’s focus on what to do next,” I said, eager to get off the subject of blame. “We’ve got his car, his plates, his address. We can go talk to him.”

  “But we didn’t catch him in the act, Jack. Did you see him in the locker, with the vic?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Did we get a good look at his face when he walked into the building? Can we even put him at the scene?”

  This was a common problem with law enforcement. Sometimes, we knew who the bad guy was, but couldn’t legally connect him to his crimes. Getting a conviction meant following a specific protocol. If any step along the way wasn’t rock solid, the state’s attorney wouldn’t even attempt to prosecute.

  “Dust the elevator,” I said. “And the knob on the security door. Let’s see if we can get that watchman downstairs to ID him.” I had a bad thought. “We should also check to see if our perp has a locker here under his real name.”

  My worry turned out to be prophetic. The man we followed here did indeed have a storage unit in his name, also on the third floor. Locker 312. That meant he had a reason to be at this facility, and could easily plead innocence in connection with the murder scene. Even if we did find a fingerprint, it wouldn’t matter.

  Smart guy. Smart, careful, and utterly devoid of humanity.

  While Herb called judge after judge, trying to find one who would issue a warrant to search unit 312, I considered our next move.

  There was only one. We had to talk to the guy.

  It was doubtful he’d give us a full confession. It was doubtful he’d even let us into his home. And if he did let us in, I wasn’t sure that was a place I wanted to be.

  I’d encountered quite a few psychos in my day. But never one that scared the shit out of me like Mr. K did.

  Present day

  2010, August 10

  “Hey, Phin. It’s Harry.”

  Phineas Troutt rubbed his bleary eyes, wishing he’d checked the caller ID before picking up. He didn’t really like Harry McGlade. No one really liked Harry McGlade. But the private detective was bearable in small doses, and they had enough of a history that Phin had a grudging respect for the guy.

  Plus, Harry was Jack’s new partner, and Jack had told Phin to be nice. While Phin couldn’t see how Jack could have gone into the private sector with someone so fundamentally flawed—especially since Jack hated being Harry’s
partner when they’d been rookies on the force twenty years ago—he respected her wishes. Phin was still adjusting to suburban life, being Jack’s live-in boyfriend. It was her house, and she paid all the bills, including paying for his latest round of chemotherapy. If she found some warped sort of satisfaction being McGlade’s partner again, Phin wouldn’t try to talk her out of it. Even though it personally would have driven him nuts.

  “What’s up, Harry?”

  “Is Jack there?”

  “No. She was gone when I woke up this afternoon.” Phin still felt a bit nauseous from his treatment yesterday, along with having a whopper of a headache, and was thinking about climbing back into bed as soon as he got off the phone.

  “She was supposed to stop by the office so we could divvy up the latest cases. Got one where this guy wants to find out if his mother is cheating on his father with his brother. You can’t make shit like that up. Ugly as hell, too. Mom looks like a fat, pink gorilla, but with bigger feet. The son has a face like a carp. I swear, I want to throw a hook in it every time he starts talking. I think people below a certain minimum standard of beauty should have to get a license before they reproduce. A minimum standard of intelligence, too.”

  He was one to talk on both counts. “I’ll tell Jack you called when she gets in touch.”

  Phin raised his thumb to hit the disconnect button, but Harry’s voice continued to drone on.

  “I called her four times. Her phone isn’t on. Goes right to voice mail.”

  “Maybe it isn’t charged.” Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to you.

  “You sure she’s not there?”

  “I’m sure, Harry. I’m alone in the house.”

  “Did you guys buy a second car?”

  “No.”

  The only car they had was Jack’s, a new SUV to replace the Chevy Nova she’d owned for almost half her life. Phin hadn’t owned a legitimate car in a while. Before moving in with Jack, the only vehicles he drove were illegally obtained. After being diagnosed with cancer, Phin’s concept of morality had become a bit…skewed for a time. The only people who knew he lived with Jack were Harry, Jack’s mom, and Jack’s old partner, Herb Benedict. There were several warrants out for Phin’s arrest.

  Funny he should wind up falling for a cop.

  “Well, you know I put a tracker in Jack’s car,” Harry said. “Doesn’t hurt to play it safe, especially with her history. According to my GPS, it’s still parked in your garage.”

  Phin felt a jolt of concern course through him. That same sensation he had while on the street, right before trouble started. He walked through the living room, opened the garage door, and stared at the SUV. In three more steps his hand was on the hood. The engine was cold. But that wasn’t what made Phin’s heart rate double. The back security door, the one leading to the yard, was missing a section of glass. A neat circle had been cut through it, carefully avoiding the foiled edges that would have set off the house alarm.

  “The car is here,” Phin said. “When was the last time you talked to Jack?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Call Herb.”

  “Herb? I hate that guy. He’s like a big, mean walrus.”

  “Someone broke into the house. I think someone took our girl, Harry. You and Herb meet me here soon as you can. Bring everything you and Jack have been working on lately, and every case going back six months. And tell Herb to bring a list of everyone Jack arrested who just got out of prison.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Phin hung up, examining the hole in the window. Jack’s home had been invaded before, and she had since beefed up her security. That included foiling the windows—running a paper-thin strip of metal along the perimeter that was hooked up to electricity. If the window was shattered, the alarm went off. The doors also had magnetic sensors, which were supposed to go off if they were opened without a key. A quick look on the outside doorjamb revealed why it hadn’t worked; a larger ceramic magnet was stuck to the frame, preventing the mechanism from springing.

  Fighting nausea, Phin hurried back into the house. He grabbed the .45 ACP he kept on top of the fridge, jacked a round into the chamber, and shoved it down the back of his jeans. Then he marched down the hallway to the bedroom. The sheets were still tousled from their night of sleep. Phin remembered popping some Compazine for nausea and codeine for pain, half asleep and groggy when Jack finally came to bed—late as she always did, watching infomercials until three a.m.

  “How are you feeling, hon?” she’d asked.

  “Better, now.”

  He fell asleep holding her hand.

  Staring at the bed now, he tried to imagine someone coming in the room and grabbing Jack while he slept off the effects of the drugs. Why hadn’t she struggled? Screamed? The antiemetic and painkillers he took were strong, but if she’d woken him coming to bed, why hadn’t she roused him while being dragged off?

  Phin rubbed his eyes, then extended the motion down his face and chin, trying to imagine how he would abduct a woman with her lover sleeping beside her. Especially a woman who was a former cop and no doubt had guns in the house.

  He examined the bed, the blankets, the pillows, then scanned the carpeting, following it out into the hallway.

  There. A smudge of dirt. Faint, no more than two inches long. It repeated, a foot later, and a foot after that, the dash-dash-dash pattern continuing into the kitchen. Phin went back into the hallway and saw the smudge had gotten longer, now a continuous, muddy line. He walked out the back door and into the yard, spying the narrow wheel track in the patch of dirt where the grass had been thin. It hadn’t rained last night, but dew collected on the lawn prior to dawn, making it damp.

  Phin walked into the tree line, where the grass ended, into a copse of trees. Plenty of places to hide and watch and wait for Jack and her boyfriend to fall asleep.

  He folded his arms across his chest, feeling a chill even though it was warm. Then he went back inside and got on Jack’s computer. First he checked her e-mail, including her deleted files and spam folder. Without finding anything out of the ordinary, he logged onto Jack’s cell phone account and printed out a list of all her recent calls, going back a week. Most of the numbers he recognized, but a few he didn’t. Using an online reverse directory, Phin worked his way through several restaurants, cable TV shopping channels, and two unknown numbers that either Herb or Harry could help with.

  Then he opened up Firefox and looked at Jack’s browsing history. Netflix. Amazon. Clothing retailers. A planned parenthood site.

  Phin accessed that and quickly read the page. It was about pregnancy in women over forty.

  He left the computer and went to the bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet. He found Jack’s birth control pills, ten still left in the pack. Then he checked the garbage can next to the toilet.

  An empty box that read “EPT,” along with a wrapper for one of the tests.

  Phin dug deeper, but the pregnancy test wasn’t in there. He went into the kitchen and checked the garbage can under the sink. Nothing.

  Where was it? And where was Jack?

  Twenty-one years ago

  1989, August 16

  “So Armani makes clothes for women, too?” I asked Shell, holding the black pantsuit in front of me and staring into the body-length mirror adjacent to Lord & Taylor’s fitting rooms.

  “It’s called a power suit,” Shell said. He stood behind me, close enough for me to feel his breath on the back of my head.

  “The shoulder pads are too big. I look like I could play defensive tackle for the Bears.”

  “Try it on. You’ll see.”

  Skeptical, I took the suit, along with a white silk blouse by someone named Ralph Lauren, and slipped into the closest room. Two minutes later, the Sears suit was in piles on the floor around me, and I stepped back out into the store in bare feet and stood in front of Shell and the mirror.

  It was like looking at a stranger.

  The pants tapered high at the waist and fl
ared out, clinging to my curves, making it obvious this was designed for women. The blouse hugged my breasts, and the shoulder pads I’d been dubious about made them look bigger than they ever had before.

  I was astonished. I actually looked feminine, while still coming across as professional.

  More than that, I was hot. Not hot in a slutty way. Hot in a confident, mature, here’s a woman in complete control way. No wonder it was called a power suit.

  “Try these on as well.”

  Shell knelt down next to me, holding a pair of black heels. “These are Givenchy. You’re a size seven and a half?”

  I nodded, wondering how he knew. Shell gently lifted up my left foot, fit on the strappy heel, and then repeated the process with its twin. Somehow, they made the lines of the suit even stronger.

  “What do you think?” he asked, staring up at me.

  I turned, looking at it from behind. It was as if Armani had made this especially for me. I’d never felt better wearing any outfit.

  “It’s amazing,” I said.

  Shell stood, putting his hand on my neck, finding my ponytail holder. He freed my long, brown hair, and I shook it loose and watched it cascade over my shoulders. I’d gone from being a professional businesswoman, to ready for a night on the town.

  “You’re beautiful,” Shell said.

  I’d never been called beautiful before by anyone other than my mother. I was a size six, thanks to the Jane Fonda workout tapes I’d stuck with for the past few years, and my face was okay, but no one would ever put me on the cover of a magazine. Yet when Shell said it, for a brief, magical moment, I believed him. The word made me feel young and girlish and a little bit heady.

  “How much is this little ensemble?” I asked. I hadn’t checked the tags because I was afraid.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m paying.”