Cuts Like a Knife: A Novel (A Kristen Conner Mystery Book 1) (43 page)

“Nice job, Kristen,” Big Tony adds. “Your dad would have been proud.”

“It’s hard to admit,” Don says, “but even her partner is proud.”

Okay, this is getting as thick as the mustard on Martinez’s hot dog.

“Buen trabajo!”
Martinez adds.
“Muy bien.”

“No applause, just throw money,” I say, embarrassed at the attention.

“You got it,” Blackshear says. “Your lunch is on me.”

“Mine too?” Konkade asks quickly.

“Yep.” Blackshear answers. “Just as soon as you figure out something before Virgil does.”

Everyone laughs.

“We haven’t caught anyone yet,” I say. “And sorry, I still don’t think it’s Dell.”

The table falls quiet.

“Esto tipo es un loco diablo
—and whoever he is, we’re gonna catch him,” Martinez says with his flair for words—even when we don’t understand all of them.

“I’m taking a long vacation after this is done,” Don says. “I don’t think my kids know who I am anymore.”

“Good point,” Konkade says. “We all have some well-earned time off coming up.”

“Ah, who needs vacation?” I ask. “I was going to go the first week of April. But I’d have missed hanging out with you guys. And without me, you guys wouldn’t have gotten anywhere on this case.”

“La próxima vez
que estés sola, ya sabes a quién llamar!”
Martinez says to me with a big wink and his hand over his heart like he’s picking up on me.

Big Tony gives him a dirty look and Martinez holds up his hands in surrender.

“I’m just kidding,” he says laughing. “I keeeed. I keeeed.”

Everyone at the table joins him. Except for me and Scalia. I don’t have the energy to bust on Martinez right now. Doesn’t mean I won’t feel good enough to do so tomorrow.

“Kristen’s right on one thing,” Scalia says. “Before we start celebrating, we got to catch a serial killer.”

“Woods can run, but he cannot hide,” says Don, invoking one of the most tired and trite clichés in law enforcement.

Even as he says it, something strikes me wrong. It can’t be Dell.

Dear
God, help me figure out what you’re trying
to tell me.

• • •

I enter my apartment and immediately know something’s wrong. It’s absolutely spic and span with everything in its place. I’m sure Mom saw to that. I always keep a clean place, but that doesn’t mean it’s always tidy. But the order and stillness isn’t what’s got my antennae up. I haven’t been as careful as I should in recent days and even though I still have police protection less than a hundred feet from my front door, I carefully and quietly de-holster my Beretta. I ease off the safety and bring it up to chest level with both hands.

I poke my head in and out of my kitchen and eating area. Nothing there. I walk in slowly and look under the table and in the broom closet anyway. I step back into my front hall. I creep up to the coat closet. I pull it open quickly and step back with drawn gun. Nothing. I repeat the process in my living room, my common bathroom, and my guest room. Still nothing.

My bedroom door is shut. I always leave it open. Maybe that’s all that’s bothering me. Of course, I wasn’t the last one in the apartment. Maybe Mom or Kaylen pulled it shut before they left.

I now ponder my options. Continue searching my apartment so I can confirm nothing is wrong or go outside, ask two officers to come inside to help me finish checking everything out and when we don’t find anything, let out a little embarrassed laugh, and explain to them that I’m just a little jittery since getting punched in the kidney and finding out my kind-of ex-boyfriend is a serial killer?

I turn the knob soundlessly and then push open the door hard enough that it slams into the wall stop. No one is hiding behind it. I keep my head on a swivel and check under the bed, in my small walk-in closet, in my tiny master bathroom, and even in the wardrobe that is probably just big enough to hold a person. Nothing. I look at my nightstand. The framed picture of me standing with Dad on the day I graduated from police academy, my uniform so neat and pressed, him in his dress blues and cap with braids on the bill, is missing. Weird.

Klarissa has said several times that she wants to come by and pick up some of my pictures and photo albums so she can have them scanned and saved electronically. Would she have just picked up that one picture and frame? I walk back into the living room. All my childhood photo albums are still lined up on the bottom row of my bookcase.

I walk back in my bedroom. I feel a chill and shudder. It has nothing to do with the weather. It’s a gorgeous June afternoon, with temperatures in the low eighties. But something has caught my attention. My window is open a couple inches.

• • •

“Sure enough, someone came up that outside wall with a ladder and through your window,” Konkade says.

It’s quarter to five. Willingham and Reynolds are holding a press conference in forty-five minutes at city hall. The mayor, police chief, and a whole lot of other muckety mucks will be on the podium. Zaworski has been allotted two minutes—and not a second longer—for opening remarks. I heard Commander Czaka was expecting to speak and is not happy that it’s Zaworski slated to be in front of the press.

Don and Martinez have the TV on WCI-TV in the living room. It’s a house rule. Have to be loyal to family. Big Tony is directing operations with some uniformed officers outside. My security detail is about to be increased. The consensus is that I represent our best chance of bringing Dell in, whether it be taking his calls and talking him into turning himself in, or staying on the phone long enough for them to triangulate his location—or by serving as bait. They don’t think he’s through with me, either way.

My phone rings. Private number.

“Hi, Dell.”

“Hi, Kristen.”

“Where are you?”

“I can’t tell you. You know I’ve got big troubles.”

“I know. So why don’t you come over and let’s talk. Are you in Chicago, Dell?”

“C’mon. I’m not that dumb.”

“Well, not coming in is not smart and I’ve always thought of you as a smart guy.”

“It’s interesting that now that you want something from me, you’re incredibly attentive,” he says with sadness. “I wish we could have talked like this before. You were always too preoccupied to really be there. Always multitasking and never doing any one thing all the way.”

“It’s been a tough couple of months, Dell. I’m listening now.”

He pauses for a second, considering. “You know, I’m thirty-four years old and have never had a girlfriend for more than a couple of months. A lot of women think I’m great, because I’m okay-looking and I spend a fair amount of money on them. But I was never good at relationships. Too many problems growing up. You were the first woman I really thought I could get to know. Do you know you were my significant other longer than any other woman in my life? Even if you didn’t think of me the same way—I got it—that’s still what you were to me.”

Alarms are ringing in my head. If he isn’t the Cutter Shark, he sure is sounding like him. I’ll be known forever as a serial killer’s significant other.

“I feel bad that I just didn’t have the same feelings for you as you did for me, Dell. But I can’t really force myself to feel something I don’t, right?”

“I wonder if you feel anything at all.”

I consider that and reject it, but answer, “You might be right,” anyway.

He sighs. “It’s good to hear you admit that.”

I let him digest that a sec. I feel like a fisherman, allowing the hook to set in deep. “So when can we get your troubles sorted out? When are you going to come and talk to me?”

“I don’t know. You won’t really understand. Your family is perfect. And I wanted to be a part of that.”

“What happened to your family, Dell?”

“It was bad. Dad left. Mom couldn’t cope so she killed herself. On his way back to pick us up and take us to Loveland, of all names, my dad was killed in a car accident. We got passed around foster homes.”

My antennae have sprung to attention and are sounding alarms.
Us. We.
“Dell, I thought you were an only child. And I didn’t know your parents had died. I assumed they were still alive.”

“How would you know? You never bothered to ask. I told Kaylen, Jimmy, your mom. But I waited for you to ask.”

I close my eyes. I really can be a self-involved jerk sometimes.

“I figured you and your people knew by now. I have a brother.”

“A brother. You have a brother?” My brain starts racing, all the missing pieces filling in gaps, like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Yes. We got separated a couple years after my dad died. He was incredibly difficult. So mostly we grew up in different foster homes. I made out pretty good; he didn’t. When I finally found him, I was in college. He was only seventeen, but he’d been in jail three times and countless juvenile homes. I put him in a nice place for troubled youth sponsored by a church I attended, and that seemed to help for a while, but when I tried to move him in with me and get him back in school—or at least help him find a job—he started disappearing for months at a time.”

“When was the last time you saw him, Dell?”

“Six, I don’t know, maybe seven months ago.”

“Tell me right now; is he the guy we’re looking for?”

There is a long enough pause that I wonder if he’s hung up.

“I don’t know for sure,” he says quietly, “but I’m afraid he is.”

I can’t bring myself to say serial killer or Cutter Shark. But he knows and I know what we’re talking about.

“What do you know for sure, Dell?”

“Not much. He emptied a bank account I keep for rainy days. It’s not the first time. He went back to my place in Durango and stole some other stuff, too. He might not have thought of it as stealing, though. He thought of the place as his, which I wanted. I wanted him to feel like he had a home. Always. But I found some things on my office computer there that are disturbing.”

“You haven’t done anything bad or criminal yourself?” I ask Dell.

“Of course not. You really think I could?” Pain now etches his voice.

“You need to come in and help us right now, Dell. It’s your only way out of this mess, and your brother’s best path toward help. You have to come in.”

“Let me think about it and call you back.”

“Don’t hang up, Dell.”

“Kristen, I’ve got to. And you’ve got to understand. You have sisters. This is my brother we’re talking about. I don’t know for sure he’s done anything wrong.”

If he believed that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Promise me you’ll call back in the next hour. This is bad, Dell. And not just for your brother.”

He hangs up before I can ask him what his brother’s first name is. I whirl toward Don and Martinez, who are looking at me with wide eyes and stunned expressions. I was concentrating so hard I wasn’t even aware they were listening.

I know the FBI has monitored the entire call from Washington, DC, but will whoever is listening know what to make of this—particularly in light of the fact that Dell is minutes away from being listed as the official Cutter Shark suspect to the world?

“We have to get to Willingham and Reynolds,” I nearly shout. “They can’t give Dell’s name and picture to the press.”

67

The ChiTownVlogger

June 8, 5:55 p.m.

JOHNSON HIT UPLOAD. Two minutes later he heard a ping indicating it was live. He decided to watch one more time.

• • •

“Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day . . . ”

A BAD CASE OF SUMMER TIME BLUES scrolls across the screen.

“We’re going to keep this short and sweet, my admirers and enemies in Chicagoland and around the world.
Zdrahstvooy
—that’s ‘hello’ in Russian for all my fans in Moscow. Your ChiTownVlogger, the only reporter on the planet who has exclusive access to the Cutter Shark, has a direct message for Deputy Director Robert Willingham of the FBI and Police Commissioner Michael Fergosi of the Chicago Police Deparment.

“Just in case any cynics out there think I’m withholding information that could lead to the apprehension of the Shark—be assured I am a humanitarian before I am a reporter. Mayor Doyle is the master of whisper campaigns and, in an attempt to discredit my reports and take some of the heat off him and his cronies, I don’t want him conducting one of his trademark smear jobs complaining that I’m sheltering a serial killer. Elections are only four months away. Of course he’ll win, but he wants to win big to show an air of invincibility.

“What’s the message I found in a bottle that washed up on the shore of Lake Michigan? There’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first? I’ll start with good news. The Cutter Shark plans to leave us in the near future. Our city will be safe once again—though not because of anything the combined forces of the CPD and FBI did.