GRAVE WALKER_A gripping noir thriller Page 3

  Kinsey dropped the file on the desk in front of me.

  “Because the body we found is your ex-girlfriend.”

  SIX

  “My ex-girlfriend?” I asked, trying to wrack my brain. I almost thought it was a joke. Another prank from Rey, the resident Latino comedian. But the look on the Captain’s face told me she was deadly serious.

  “I’m afraid so,” Kinsey said.

  “Thanks for being so considerate. Using a dead ex as a bargaining chip. Jesus.”

  “I’m not here to make you feel better, Mr. Blume. I have a job to do.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. The room was heavy with anticipation when I asked the question they were waiting for. “So who is it?”

  “Darcey Holland,” Kinsey replied matter-of-factly.

  “Darcey,” I muttered absently. My mind filled with half memories and sensations from years ago as I tried to recall our time together. It had been good, better than good, almost something big, but it hadn’t worked out. I hadn’t thought about Darcey Holland in nearly a decade. Now I couldn’t think of anything but her.

  Christ, what a mess.

  “And you want me to look into this in exchange for access to Teach?”

  Kinsey looked at me with a squint. It was clear that she wasn’t quite sure how to take me just yet. “You just expected to waltz back in here and have the same permissions and privileges you did when you were a detective?” she said. “Given that, I didn’t think some creative power plays on my part would offend you. Let me remind you, I’ve seen your record. I’ve also called across the pond to learn about your cases. You’re good…but unique. You have a certain way of doing things. You rub a lot of people the wrong way, but you get results.”

  “Something like that,” I said. After that, I wasn’t sure where to go with the conversation. She held all the cards, and I knew it.

  I hadn’t spoken to Darcey in almost seven years. No, eight. It made me sad to know that she was dead. Worse than that, murdered. And her body had been discovered just days before I had returned home. I wasn’t nearly naïve enough to think that was a coincidence.

  Considering my options, it seemed that Kinsey held the keys to the kingdom. If I wanted in, I would have to play ball—whether I liked it or not.

  “Fine,” I finally said. “I’ll help. But before I so much as lift a finger for you, I want assurance that you have Teach and that he’s not going anywhere.”

  Kinsey considered this for a moment and nodded. “I can do better than that,” she said, again scanning the paperwork on her desk. “But as you can see, I’m quite busy.” She then looked to Rey and said, “Detective Sanchez, can you please escort Mr. Blume and let him see the feed from the interrogation room?”

  “Can do,” Rey said. “Come on, Blume.”

  SEVEN

  We exited Kinsey’s office and headed back down the hall, hanging a left that led to a series of other offices and three interrogation rooms that I knew all too well. The layout was familiar even if the building was new. I couldn’t even start to guess how many hours I’d spent in those places, trying to break suspects down.

  These were the rooms that saw blood, sweat, and tears—literally. As we passed them, I was hit by a stab of macabre nostalgia.

  Rey led me into the review room where two flat screen TVs were bolted to the wall. They were modern replacements for the much older ones that had been there the last time I’d been in an observation suite. Rey grabbed a remote from the desk in the room and punched a series of buttons. A grainy, color image popped up, revealing what was going on in Interrogation Room #2.

  As the image appeared, I took a calming breath. A man sat behind a small table—the same small table that was featured in countless police dramas on TV and movies. The man was muscular with a shaven head and strong features, but he gave away nothing of what he was thinking. Sitting alone in the drab room, he was hunched over the table in boredom, defeat, or both. He didn’t cry or shuffle, he simply sat.

  Just seeing him there, I felt my muscles tensing. I was so close to ending the mystery that had plagued me, and yet there were still obstacles.

  “Roland Teach,” Rey said. “Alive and well, and very much in our possession. We’re letting him sweat it out right now. One of our guys will go try his hand one more time in half an hour or so. If he still offers up nothing, he’ll be moved back to his holding cell, 6B.”

  “He’s here for at least a couple of days, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And that’s saying a lot since he has some pretty powerful people pushing for his release.”

  “Powerful people like who?”

  “I can’t say. Not now, anyway,” Rey said, a little hesitantly. “Don’t worry. Teach is going nowhere at the moment. But if you want to speak with him, we’ll need to get into this Holland thing. This wasn’t my case originally, but I traded with the lead detective. I had a feeling you’d be interested.”

  With Teach secure, if out of reach, I decided my only play was to get to the bottom of the Darcey Holland situation as fast as possible. I tore my eyes from the monitor and focused on Rey.

  “OK, is there a file?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’ve got it in my office if you want to take a look.”

  “The sooner the better,” I said, suddenly pushing my anger at Kinsey to the side and replacing it with a need to get into this case. Despite the years and the booze, I still had a sense of professionalism buried deep inside…somewhere.

  Sure, I wanted to rush into the room with Teach and vent eighteen months of fury on him, but the death of Darcey nagged at my conscience. She had been a good person. And like all good people mixed up in my life, she had wound up dead. The least I owed her was some kind of resolution.

  Rey led me to his office where I found my bags waiting for me as promised. He moved behind his desk and pulled a single folder out of a stack of about a dozen or so. He dropped it down in front of me and took a seat behind the desk.

  “How much do you know about Darcey?” he asked.

  “Not much since we broke up. We only dated for about a year and a half. When we were dating, though, she was finishing up med school. She didn’t really have much time for a boyfriend with a stressful career path ahead of him.”

  That was the understatement of the century.

  “Well, from what we’ve gathered on her, she did well for herself after med school. She worked abroad for a while, specializing in pharmaceutical medicine. A stint with Médecines Sans Frontières even. She came back to New York a couple of years ago. She bounced between a few hospitals before finally starting up her own private clinic.”

  “Huh,” I said, picking up the file and leafing through it. “She finally found her thing.”

  Rudderless, she had called herself. Of all the things, I remembered this about Darcey Holland. Sweet, smart and compassionate but uncertain, no confidence in her choices.

  “Well, for a while, I guess,” Rey said. “Two nights ago, though, she was discovered face down in the bay out near Red Hook. We don’t think she’d been there too long before the body was discovered by a jogger. No witnesses yet, but we have notified her sister. We also questioned the last few men she was involved with—another doctor, a marine biologist, and a writer.”

  No wonder she didn’t find a potential relationship with a beat cop interesting, I thought, a bit morbidly.

  “Are any of them suspects?” I asked.

  “Not at this point. They have solid alibis for the twenty-four hours prior. None of them fit the profile either. CSU have processed the scene, but it’s pretty clear she entered the river upstream somewhere and the body washed down here.”

  Flipping through the folder, I absently listened to Rey’s words. The crime scene photographs caught my eye. The first showed a woman face down in the water, partially hung along the shore. She was fully clothed and her blonde hair stretched out into the water.

  It was a haunting image. Her pale body stretched out like a dancer, eterna
lly performing in death. Her neck too was turned in a way that revealed only a bit of her face, but what I saw, combined with the bright blonde hair, was unmistakably Darcey.

  “Damn,” I said. The familiar pangs of sadness touched my nerves.

  “Sorry,” Rey said. “Did you guys stay close after the breakup?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, not really. I heard a few things through the grapevine, but I met Sarah and after that—”

  I almost flipped to the next picture, but then I noticed the necklace around Darcey’s neck. It was barely visible in the picture, but it was there. I squinted my eyes a bit as I drew the picture close to my face. I was pretty sure it was a silver chain. If it were attached to a jewel or pendant of some kind, that part was in the water and unseen.

  “What is it?” Rey asked.

  “The necklace,” I said, still not sure if it was worth chasing after. “She never wore jewelry, except a ring her grandmother had passed down. She especially hated necklaces.”

  Rey let the thought hang in the air for a moment. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Well, you know, things change, people change. I’m pretty sure I remember there being a few rings on her fingers, too.”

  “Really?” I said, surprised. Apparently, Darcey really had changed over the course of the last few years, but still, something felt off. Darcey had hated necklaces. She said they made her feel like someone was constantly squeezing at her neck.

  “I need to get to the morgue.”

  “This soon?” Rey asked, a little surprised. “You don’t waste time, do you?”

  “Not when I only have seventy-two hours.”

  “Need some help?”

  “Not right now,” I said as the cogs of my mind turned. “All I need from you is the quickest way to get access to a weapon. I’d really rather not wait hours to fill out consultant paperwork just to get a firearm. You think you can speed that process along for me?”

  “You think you’ll need it?”

  “What I think and what happens are usually very different. Besides, better safe than sorry,” I said, not entirely comfortable with the idea of chasing down a killer unarmed.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Rey said, reaching for the phone. “You still have your license, right?”

  I nodded and waited while he made a few calls. I kept thinking about a gun, and how I’d done everything I could to work overseas without using one. Sometimes, it wasn’t too hard. I hoped the Darcey case would prove simple and wouldn’t require any force, much less the need for a gun.

  But this was New York, a town I knew intimately. And here, things were rarely simple. I hoped I wouldn’t need the gun, but as I looked back to the picture of Darcey floating motionless in the river, I was fairly certain that I was about to put myself right back in the crosshairs.

  EIGHT

  Surrounding myself with dead bodies was nothing new. An unenviable habit of mine, given my investigations in London. I had even become close to Nicole Remay, the woman working in the coroner’s office there, and she had helped me break a case more than once.

  Here in New York, the office of the medical examiner wasn’t nearly as alluring without the sharp wit of my female partner in crime. I entered the morgue, wishing she were there. It was always good to have someone on the inside (even when it came to morgue visits), and without Nicole’s guidance, I felt like an intruder among the dead—especially since I hadn’t even been back in New York for three whole hours.

  That thought scratched at the back of my skull, and I felt the urge for a drink once again. The familiar smoke building inside, urging me to fill my body with liquid oblivion.

  Not now.

  I pushed the sensation down and strode down the sterile hallway. At least the building was cool, away from the baking concrete of the streets outside.

  Rey had called ahead for me, so the medical examiner was waiting when I knocked on the door to his office. He was middle-aged, maybe in his early forties. He wore a pair of thin eyeglasses and had a finely trimmed moustache that didn’t suit him. His gaunt appearance virtually screamed morgue-worker. It again made me miss Remay something terrible.

  “Mr. Blume?” he asked.

  “That’s me.”

  The examiner stood up and offered his hand. “Alex Brooks, assistant ME.”

  I shook the man’s hand, surprised at the grip. His pallid complexion and meager size made me think he’d be no stronger than a ghoul.

  “I’m never quite sure how to approach things when a detective or officer comes by to see a body,” Brooks said. “I work alone most of the time. Do you need assistance? Would you like me to come back with you?”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I said. “Could you give me the rundown of what we know so far, though?”

  “Sure can. Darcey Holland, thirty-nine years old. She was discovered in the Hudson about thirty-six hours ago. Preliminary findings showed a fairly potent sedative in her blood stream, Nembutal. Other than that, there’s not much else to say…except that the body is in pretty bad shape.”

  “Water damage?” I asked.

  Every cop’s worst nightmare. A water-logged corpse.

  “No, we were fortunate on that end to recover her quickly. But there was some severe damage to her facial tissue.”

  “What are your assumptions?”

  The examiner shrugged, as if he really didn’t care how she’d died. When you worked with death every day, one stiff was probably as good as the next.

  “I’m thinking probably suicide,” he continued. “There was a bridge about half a mile up the river, and she could have easily floated down. The damage to the face indicates that she could have fallen and struck her head or gotten caught on a rock as the body moved downriver. There doesn’t seem to be any indication of other trauma.”

  I nodded, trying to imagine Darcey killing herself. She’d always been sweet and gentle, soft-spoken but full of life. “Ok,” I said. “Where’s the body?”

  He reached for a cardkey at the edge of his desk and handed it to me. “Exam Room Seven. Take your time.”

  I nodded my thanks, took the card, and left his office. I made my way to Exam Room Seven as fast as I could, wanting to be out of there as quickly as possible. I found the room and inserted the card in the slot beneath the doorknob. The lock clicked, and I entered the room, closing the door behind me.

  The only noise came from the gentle hum of the refrigeration units.

  Quiet as a tomb.

  The exam table sat in the middle of the room with a sheet draped over it. A shape lay beneath the sheet, and the face that remained uncovered, eyes closed and at peace, was both familiar and strange to me at once. I approached her timidly and gasped at the sight before me. It seemed surreal to see the first woman I had ever loved in such a state. The examiner hadn’t been kidding about her head. The flesh was missing from most of the right side of her face and neck. The absence of skin continued downward in ragged tears to areas beneath the cover. The right corner of her mouth looked to have been permanently stretched down by whatever had caused the damage. Flecks of chipped teeth could be seen through the slight tear in the corner of her mouth.

  With a grimace, I looked away.

  Here I was again, inspecting the ruined corpse of someone I once held dear. Death seemed to follow me at every turn, and I felt bone-tired. I just wanted to be back in a bar, staring into the bottom of a glass, but that wasn’t an option. Darcey had been a good person, and the least I could do was find out what had happened to her. With a sigh, I moved closer and scanned the body.

  As I did, my eyes landed on her neck where the necklace had been. Curious, I stepped forward and pulled the cover away from her left side. I looked to her fingers, sitting motionless by her side. There were indentations on her pinky and ring finger where she had been wearing rings, but again, much of the skin was missing. From the looks of those indentations, she’d worn the bands for quite some time. I knew she’d worn the one from her grandmother since
her sixteenth birthday without fail. She’d worn it on her ring finger and had always joked that the man she eventually married would have to be a saint if he expected her to replace her grandmother’s ring with an engagement ring.

  Looking back, I should have known that wouldn’t be me. I was certainly no saint even then, and by now, I’d crossed more lines than a drunk driver.

  I thought about the necklace again. Rey had also said she’d been wearing rings, hence the indentations on her fingers. That presented two odd details: first, that Darcey had been wearing jewelry at all; second, she’d clearly not been robbed. So maybe the examiner was right in assuming that it had been suicide.

  I found it hard to imagine, but maybe Rey was right. People change. Hell, I was already a very different person than I’d been when I left New York, and that had been only a little over a year. Maybe something had happened in the course of the last ten years that drove her to kill herself. If that were the case, this was going to be a very easy job to wrap up, and I’d be speaking to Roland Teach in no time.

  But the more I thought about it, the more that seemed an easy way out. A simple and selfish solution to a complex problem. This was a woman I once cared for.

  She didn’t deserve this.

  I couldn’t buy the fact that Darcey had killed herself. No way. People changed, but not that much. With a heavy sigh, I pulled the sheet back up and left the room. With the image of Darcey’s ravaged face in my mind, I went back to the examiner’s office.

  I didn’t knock this time, opting instead to casually walk in. I handed Brooks the cardkey, and he looked surprised that I was back so soon, dropping a magazine to his desk. I caught a glimpse of an article about mail-order brides. Little wonder he didn’t appreciate visitors.

  “All done?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “Before I go, though, could you get me the case files? I’d like to see the details of the sedative and the jewelry she was wearing when the body was discovered.”