Fury From Hell (29 page)

Fury Abatu kept the recollection from the man.  It was not sure what he would do with the information and how that would affect its regaining entry to the original host.  Feeling harried, Abatu clamped down hard on Yearwood to keep him under control but he was male and more unruly than the demon was used to…

***

It was almost ten o’clock in the evening and the entire team was poring over the discs Feinster and Holden had picked up from the casino.  The warrant Clift put through allowed them to get copies of every disc they could find including some recently trashed discs that were not yet destroyed.  They even gained access to the back-up logs and the archived feeds.

Bleary-eyed and needing food, drink and sleep Feinster pushed back noisily from her computer and stood up yawning loudly.  She caused a chain-reaction and within moments the other three were shutting down their machines.

“No word about the hair or the half-print?”  Yearwood asked stretching and bending in an attempt to get the crick out of his back.  Clift shook his head and commented while scratching himself.

“You think we’d all be sitting here pawing through hours of footage of parking lots, employee comings and goings and the secret john discs if they had?”

They all got a good chuckle out of that.

“Yeah, pretty surprised they have a camera in each stall,” Betty said.

“But think about it,” Yearwood clicked off his monitor.  “If you are trying to steal something wouldn’t you go to the bathroom to hide it so you can get out of the casino with whatever it is?” And that’s when it hit him.  He remembered where he’d seen Derrick Palmer…with Jennifer at the casino early last Saturday morning!

Abatu roared its displeasure.  For furies, men were so much harder to manipulate!  Abatu wished for just a moment it was a black-eyed demon.  Then, it realized what it wished and shuddered, fervently wishing the Ancient One had not intercepted that thought.

Yearwood stared at Jennifer with undisguised disgust but the Fury pushed that feeling aside, made him break eye contact and influenced him to tilt his neck to crack it using more force than was necessary to cover his sudden stillness.

“Dude! You’re creepin’ me out! You look like you might drop and do fifty push-ups, or something. Quit it!” Feinster said, and walked away shaking her head.  He had just proven to Betty, yet again, how odd he truly was.

Holden said nothing.  To Jennifer, he looked more like he had a revelation more so than he needed to do a cardio workout.  However, she kept that observation to herself.  She’d discuss it with Betty, or Lady Ariella, later and walked briskly to catch up with Betty.

***

Yearwood watched Holden hurry away and fumed.  He turned around to face his cubicle forcing himself to sit calmly without banging his fist on the desk as he felt like doing.

Clift rolled his chair back and peered over at Yearwood’s back and called out to him. “So, I thought you were leaving?”

Taking deep breaths, Yearwood waited a beat before speaking. “Yeah, thought I was but I had an idea regarding the Gerimo sting.  I’m going to work on it, develop the idea a bit more before sharing it.  I know the Rennkler case is priority but we can’t let the multi precinct sting fall by the wayside either.  Probably head home in about thirty.  You should head on out.  We’ve got to get back on it tomorrow and work this Rennkler case, maybe, from some other angles.”  He flipped on his computer and it whirred to life with a high-pitched whine making his ears hurt a bit.

The Fury clamped down on his anger; it knew that he was close to the edge but being within him was more than the Fury could have hoped for.  It was a brilliant stroke of genius to have found him — he was partnering with the original host!  The Fury infused him with peace and tranquility which brought his inner rage down a few notches enough for him to play it cool for Clift.

He heard Clift grunt as he hefted his weight out of the chair.  “Night, Yearwood.  Don’t stay too late.”

Yearwood felt a clap on his left shoulder as the veteran cop headed to the locker room.  He turned and watched him lumber away as loathing and anger filled his mind.  He swung back to his computer and typed in his password.  He knew his raging emotions really had nothing to do with Clift.  It was all about Holden and how her Oscar award winning performance towards him for the past two years.  He had been emasculated by a woman…
yet again
.  He was still seething about Babs’ rejection.

While Holden had brushed him off kindly, unlike Babs Strickland in Forensics, the gorgeous curvy bombshell had said no to him over and over just as she had done with every other man in the precinct.  He hadn’t felt bad because no one had scored.  But with Holden, she’s kind, gives him the time of day, and actually went for a coffee with him a few times.  She strings him along and then goes for a guy like Palmer?  Smooth, suave, refined and clearly a ladies’ man.  Holy Holden
lied
.  In addition to being a weirdo atheist, she, in actuality, could not be trusted.  Holden just didn’t want any of the men in the precinct.  Yearwood understood now.  Holden was too good for the likes of the guys in the precinct.  Holden was just like Officer Strickland — just not as beautiful.

Yearwood bared his teeth in a feral grimace as he thought about the buxom blonde that humiliated him in front of the dykey Feinster.  His facial expression would have frightened his colleagues if any of them had been around.

The NYPD home page came up and he went to the one link that he and all of his cronies had always avoided.  It was the sole link that would allow him to exact his revenge on Holden and make her pay for all she had done to him and his buddies in blue in the 85
^th
precinct.

With grim satisfaction, he clicked on the Internal Affairs link and proceeded to file an anonymous report giving all of the details he could find about Holden being with Derrick Palmer mere hours before his death.

While Yearwood didn’t feel she had a thing to do with the man’s demise, he would love to see her squirm while under the watchful eyes of their fellow internal rats.  The more he typed the better he felt.

Prodded and buoyed by this male host’s high energy, the Fury unwittingly assisted and added in a few details that would lend more credibility to the accusation.  The demon knew better than to provide Yearwood with the exact means of death and the disembowlment aspects of the body.  However, the Fury helped with suppositions as to how the pair could have gotten to the hotel and the location of Palmer’s car.  He also brought into question whether Holden had a gun other than her police issues that might be unregistered.

Almost laughing, Yearwood finished his e-mail and clicked send.  Shutting down the computer for the second time that evening he felt so good he started to whistle as he walked to the locker rooms.

The Fury settled into the background of Yearwood’s mind.  It watched as he showered; his mind and emotions cooling in as the tepid water hit him full force.  More pensive than ever before in its long life, the Fury wondered if it had just helped, or hurt, the original host by allowing the male host to contact Internal Affairs.  The Fury wondered how this would impact finding Kyma Barnes’ killer and avenging the woman’s soul…

***

Tuesday, November 13
^th

Walking up the stairs into the precinct minutes before seven in the morning, Betty hurried while Jennifer moved more slowly.  She was scratching her neck absently where some pieces of the herbs from her twice daily bath had stuck to her skin again.

Trying to distract herself, Jennifer tried to map out the day in her mind.  She knew that the team was spinning their wheels waiting for the results from Forensics to come in.  She needed to get back to work on the Barnes case and input the queries in both the national and international databases.  She needed to see if there were any similar cases to the murders of Barnes and the woman in Castleman’s case in Missouri.

Jennifer prayed that the analysis would come back today for the Rennkler case and give them a name or ten to chase down.  She was getting tired of the desk work.  Hurrying down to the locker room, Jennifer didn’t notice Doug Freeman from Internal Affairs watching her as she passed right by him with her head down scratching her neck.

***

By the time Jennifer got to her cubicle, the rest of the team was nowhere to be seen.  A scribbled note on a Post-It on her monitor told her to go to the small conference room.

“Damnit! Why didn’t they just wait for me?  They knew I was here.” As she got up, her cell phone rang.  She looked at the screen and swore.  She sat back down and took the call.

“Chad this isn’t a good time.”

“Well good morning to you, too, sunshine!  How was your weekend?”

“I spoke to you Sunday.  It was fine but it didn’t end that great.  Picked up a new case that I can’t blow.”

“Would that happen to be the Rennkler murder?”

She just swore colorfully. “Yeah, guess it is.  So, that means our date is off for Friday?”

“I’d say so unless we wrap it up before then.”

“Does that look possible?”

“Look, I’m not hurrying shit because you want to wine and dine me…”

“Ouch!  Easy on my ego little lady! I just wondered because I still want to see you.  Besides, Rennkler’s death-slash-murder’s all over the news —”

“Can’t talk about it and I’ve gotta go.  I’ll call when I can.” She clicked off and headed for the conference room still trying to forgive him for doing that blasted reading.

Walking in, no one looked up as they were all talking over each other and gesticulating at the images of five men projected on the white wall.  She had no idea three people could make so much noise.  She wasn’t even sure they knew she had come in.  She sat in a vacant seat in the corner on the outskirts of their grouping.  Jennifer waited mutely for them to acknowledge her presence.  Her face grew warmer with each passing moment that they ignored her.

Yearwood was the only one who finally looked over a few minutes later. He sneered at her and said, “Glad you could join us, Holden.”  The smile he gave her had no warmth in it.  In fact, her skin crawled in the face of his downright nefarious smile.  Pointedly ignoring him, she stuck her foot out and nudged Betty on the shin.

“What Holden?”

Blinking at the terseness in her friend’s voice, she paused.

“If you had hurried up in the locker room you would have found out along with the rest of us that these five guys are matches for the half-print.  The hair’s another story.  Don’t have an exact match but there are about 700 people that ping in New York City alone for an exact match in the seventy to ninety-eight percent range.  And all five of these guys are in the ninety percent range.”  Gulping at the hurt and embarrassment that shone in Betty’s eyes, Jennifer understood immediately; it was perceived that she was holding not up her end on this case. “So, the yelling’s about how will the four of us check out the five guys?  Or, is the problem which one of us will do the fifth one?”

Looking each cop dead in the eye, Jennifer pushed her own worries aside and focused on this case.  They all stopped and gaped at her. “What?”  She asked turning to each of them in turn, unsure of her footing.  Clearly there was something else she had missed.

Clift cleared his throat and began hesitantly.  “Um.  No.  That’s not exactly all we’ve been…discussing.  Um, there’s a rumor going around that...” Clift averted his eyes and looked to Betty for support.  She looked away from him and refused to meet Jennifer’s piercing brown gaze.

Jennifer looked over at Yearwood and he was pretending to clean his perfectly manicured nails.  Clift began again and she dragged her eyes back to him.

“There’s a rumor that you were at Resorts World casino the same night that Rennkler bought it.”

Jennifer stilled and unconsciously held her breath.

“Furthermore, the rumor also has it that you left with a guy that was found pre-dawn on Saturday morning burned to death in a hotel on the edge of Brooklyn.”  He blinked several times before he looked up into her shocked eyes.  He added quickly, “We know you didn’t do anything.  It was just — bad timing.  You pick up a guy that happens to get whacked a few hours later.  It’s all causal.  But, you know what that means…”

Her throat tightened up and her mouth went dry.  She squeezed her lips together and stoically continued to stare at Clift.

“I’m not sure I know where you’re going with all —”

“So you were there on Friday night?!” Yearwood pressed.

They all peered at her waiting for her answer.

Looking at them all she swallowed audibly and nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Clift asked the question that had been on all of their minds since he found out.  “So why didn’t you tell us you were there when we first started working the case?  You must have known you would have been spotted on the security discs.  Why put us on that trail if you wanted to cover where you’d been?”

Staring down at her hands the hard truth began to slowly filter in.  There would be an investigation into her actions because it was protocol and the way she played it looked shady.

Shit!  Shit!  SHIT!!
She took some deep breaths, looked up and faced Clift with clear eyes.  Her eyes were filled with a resolve that she didn’t feel as she began walking down a road she had never taken. “I didn’t mention it because I was embarrassed,” she shrugged and looked at Yearwood pointedly before continuing.

“I knew that I had a goody-two-shoes rep here in the precinct and sharing voluntarily that my personal life reality was different wasn’t something I felt had a place in this case.  That’s my
personal
life and my choice is my own as to who I see and what I do off-duty.  By the same token, I didn’t think that I should keep the information to myself about the casino connection.  I felt that would have hindered the case.”

Her eyes flashed angrily as she looked at Betty’s down-turned eyes.  She wondered if her friend had said even one word in her defense after all that they had been through in the last seventy-two hours, but there was no time for that now.  Jennifer knew that her ass was on the line and she would have to defend herself sooner than she had anticipated.