Desolate Mantle Page 3

Tyke arched an eyebrow. As Shaun spoke, Cora returned to her desk beside Tyke’s. Her black, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a French braid tonight. It made the angles of her face sharper. For her, that meant a fierce sort of beauty. She started to sit, then heard Shaun’s words and glanced worriedly between the three men.

  Gabe glanced at his two fellow detectives. He and Tyke had been partners for nearly two years. Cora had been partnered with the detective that used the now-vacant desk on Gabe’s right. That detective—Ed Marquez—had transferred several months ago. A replacement still hadn’t been found. Not shocking. Abstreuse City was one of the most dangerous in the country. Most detectives didn’t stay more than a year. Those that did could practically have their pick of jobs afterward. Gabe was the exception. He’d been in Abstreuse three plus years. He hadn’t seen any reason to leave.

  Cora worked most of her cases solo, but that was true of Gabe and Tyke, too. The work load in this place was so big that even those with partners rarely worked on cases together. There were simply too many. The three of them hashed things out together, using one another as sounding boards, and backed each other up when necessary. Gabe didn’t see any reason to hide what Shaun had to say from them. They knew all about his brother.

  “No. Just tell me here.” Suddenly it was harder to breathe, as though Gabe were walking a steep incline rather than standing still beside his desk.

  Shaun hesitated, then nodded. “In terms of DNA and trace, there’s nothing. As usual. No prints either.”

  Gabe let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “What are you being all intense about, then?”

  Shaun didn’t smile. He pulled a manila envelope Gabe hadn’t noticed before from under his arm. From it, he drew a large photo and placed it in front of Gabe on the desk. Tyke and Cora jumped instantly to their feet, Tyke leaning over his computer to peer at it, Cora coming around to take the vacant seat by Gabe. Shaun rolled his eyes but didn’t object.

  Gabe gazed down at the picture. The stamp in the corner showed it had been taken by a crime lab camera.

  It’s so unnatural, the bond between brothers.

  The photo showed what appeared to be the wooden cross Gabe received in the mail six weeks ago, only this one had two sides that lay open like a book, connected by a tiny hinge. The hinge was the same color as the wood, rendering it nearly invisible. Gabe studied it for a full minute before he identified the tiny part.

  He looked up at Shaun. “Is this my cross? The one I got?”

  Shaun nodded.

  “It’s a locket?” Gabe’s eyes returned to the photo.

  “Of sorts,” Shaun said.

  “How did I miss that?” Gabe murmured. He was talking to himself, but Shaun answered anyway.

  “Not your fault. The lab tech almost missed it too. The hinge blended in so well, it just looked like an imperfection in the wood. The line where the two halves came together was impossible to see with the naked eye. If not for a shrewd lab worker, who thought the cross as a whole was too flawless to have even a small imperfection, and went over the bump with a magnifying glass, we wouldn’t have realized it at all.”

  Gabe nodded, feeling numb. Below the numbness, a subtle foreboding lurked. The cross opened like two halves of a locket, showing smooth, pale wood inside. And carved across both halves were those words:

  It’s so unnatural, the bond between brothers.

  Gabe sat back, turning the phrase over in his head. Where had he heard it before? Was it a film reference? Something from a book?

  “Does it mean something to you, Gabe?” Cora asked from beside him.

  “I…” Gabe pinched the bridge of his nose, turning the phrase over in his head. The memory came, then. A memory he had relived a thousand times in the past twenty-five years.

  “Don’t touch my brother!” Dillon yelled, while six-year-old Gabe cowered behind him. The man had just struck six-year-old Gabe in the face for not moving fast enough. Something hard in his hand had made the blow sting badly.

  The man in the ragged grey trench coat stared down at the boys. “It’s so unnatural sometimes, the bond between brothers.” Neither of them answered and the man’s face darkened. “Lie back down in the grass. You. The little one.” The man had dark, greasy hair that fell to the nape of his neck and yellow teeth. He continually slicked the hair back from his forehead with his fingers.

  After a moment, Dillon turned to Gabe. “Do as he says, little brother.”

  “Dillon,” Gabe had sobbed, pressing his face into his older brother’s shirt. It had a picture of a tornado on it. “I’m scared.”

  “It’ll be okay, Gabe. I won’t let him hurt you. Just do what he says.”

  Gabe let Dillon guide him onto his belly is the warm, dry grass. The scent of dirt entered his nose when it was an inch from the ground.

  The man in the trench coat paced back and forth in front of them. He muttered to himself, but Gabe couldn’t understand the words. All he could see were the man’s grubby, tan hiking boots, moving back and forth in front of his nose.

  Finally, the man stopped, looking down at the two boys. Fear paralyzed ever muscle in Gabe’s body. “You.” The man was addressing Dillon. “Come here.”

  Dillon glanced worriedly at Gabe, but obeyed, taking several slow steps forward, toward the mean man. Gabe put his hands on the ground and started to push upward.

  “You stay there!” the man snapped. Lip trembling, Gabe obeyed.

  Silence followed, and Gabe couldn’t understand what the man was doing beyond simply staring at him and Dillon, but he didn’t dare look up again.

  “You’re coming with me,” the man finally said. “Go get in my van.”

  Gabe found the courage to lift his head, to see who the man was talking to. Dillon. Dillon’s eyebrows had gone down as they always did before he started a fight. “Why?” Dillon asked through gritted teeth.

  Gabe didn’t think Dillon ought to be talking to the man like that. It never went over well with their mother, and the man in the trench coat was scarier than she was, even when she was mad.

  “To give me directions out of town,” the man said. “Since you’re older, you’ll know more than your brother.”

  “I can just tell you—”

  “You want me to take your brother instead, boy?”

  The snap in the man’s voice made Gabe shudder, and a chilly fear filled his chest at the prospect of having to get in the man’s car. Dillon didn’t answer.

  “Then you’re coming with me,” the man said firmly. “In the van. Now.”

  Dillon kept his gaze on the man, but didn’t move. “You. Boy.”

  Gabe flinched, knowing the man was addressing him now. He slowly raised his head.

  “Where do you live? In which direction?”

  Gabe raised a trembling arm and pointed down the street toward his house. In the same direction he and Dillon had been traveling on their bikes before the man in the trench coat had stepped out of the woods and pulled them off the sidewalk.

  The man in the trench coat turned and looked in the direction Gabe pointed, as though he could see Gabe’s house in the distance, though that was impossible from here. After a moment, he turned back. “Good.” He reached out and took Dillon by the arm, pulling Gabe’s brother toward him and moving toward the blue van parked out on the street, only feet away. “Can you count to one hundred, Boy?”

  Gabe didn’t think he could, but he nodded anyway.

  “When we’re gone, you count to one hundred. Only when you’ve reached that number, then you can go home. Understand?”

  Tears pooled in Gabe’s eyes and leaked down his cheeks. This was not good. Not good at all.

  The man dragged Dillon the rest of the way toward the van, opened the sliding door, and pushed Dillon inside. Gabe caught a glimpse of Dillon’s fearful eyes, and for some reason the yellow bandanna tied around Dillon’s left arm—he always wore that—stood out to him. Then the sliding door, which didn’t have a window, slammed
shut.

  The man in the trench coat took several steps toward Gabe and he cringed.

  “To one hundred. Remember boy?”

  “What’ll I tell my mom?” Gabe sobbed into his pudgy, six-year-old hands, the smell of the dirt and the grass still filling his nose.

  The man turned on his toe to look down at Gabe. A thick silence reigned briefly before he answered in his nasally voice. “Tell her God saved you from Hell. But he couldn’t save me.”

  He threw a string of prayer beads into the grass. They landed inches from Gabe’s face. Then the man got into the fat, unmarked blue van and drove away.

  Gabe only counted to twenty before leaping to his feet and tearing off toward home, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Gabe shook his head to clear it and cursed, pinching the bridge of his nose again.

  Cora placed a gentle hand on his arm. “What is it, Gabe?”

  Gabe dropped his hand to find all three of them staring at him with concern. He sighed and leaned back in his chair, not sure how to begin.

  “Gabe, what?” Tyke burst out. “Quit doing that silent, worried thing. It freaks us out.”

  In another situation, Gabe would have rolled his eyes, but didn’t have the heart for it at the moment. “The…man that took Dillon. He said that to us. When it happened.”

  A full ten seconds of silence met his words. Shaun finally broke it.

  “I’ve never noticed that in the reports.”

  Gabe glanced up at his boss, wondering how much of an authority Shaun was on those reports. Gabe had read them hundreds of times, of course, but he didn’t expect anyone else had. The way Shaun spoke now, Gabe wondered if he’d kept a closer eye on Dillon’s case than Gabe ever realized.

  “That’s because I didn’t remember that before now. The memory just came back to me. He said it early on. I know I mentioned in the report that Dillon jumped in front of me. Tried to protect me?”

  Shaun nodded.

  “It was right after that. He said this,” Gabe tapped the photo. “Only, I think he said sometimes. ‘It’s so unnatural sometimes, the bond between brothers.’”

  “He said that right after Dillon tried to protect you?” Cora’s voice was incredulous.

  Gabe nodded.

  “Why the change, do you think?” Tyke asked. “Why not put the ‘sometimes’ on the cross?”

  “I think it’s a spatial problem,” Shaun said. “The words take up the entire surface area. Where would he have put another word?”

  “He could use smaller font, or get a bigger cross.”

  Shaun shook his head but Gabe answered. “All the crosses have been the same size. Minute variations, but we’re talking within a sixteenth of an inch. He prefers this size. It’s part of his signature.”

  “And this font is so small you need a magnifier to read it,” Shaun added. “I doubt there’s an easily accessible machine that could engrave smaller font. This guy keeps a low profile purposely, and something smaller would require specialty equipment.”

  Tyke nodded thoughtfully. “So what does this mean?

  “There’s still no way to trace it,” Gabe said. “Unless there’s a wood font engraving database I don’t know about.” The corner of Tyke’s mouth curl up. “But I want to examine all the old crosses. If this one opens up, maybe others do too and we just missed it. Less shrewd lab techs, you know?”

  “I thought of that,” Shaun said, “and already put it in motion. I filled out the paperwork to pull all the old rosaries from evidence and get them re-examined.”

  “Thanks, Shaun,” Gabe said.

  “It may be a needle in a haystack,” Cora said, “but you could try and trace the word style. It doesn’t look hand-engraved, or at least, not by an amateur. It was either done by machine or by a master. You could always take a picture and Google it with ‘wood engraving’ or something. See what you come up with.”

  Gabe nodded. Somehow, he didn’t think it would pan out, but it was worth a shot. “Yeah, I’ll do that.” The numbness was wearing off, the deeper foreboding growing stronger. Every time he thought he could finally move on from Dillon’s disappearance, something like this happened. As long as his brother’s case remained unsolved, of course it would lurk in the back of Gabe’s mind, but without anything to forward with, he also had to live his life. Since the anniversary of Dillon’s death—which had held little drama, emotional or otherwise, for him this year—he hadn’t thought about the case at all. But with this new development—the first truly new thing in years—his obsessive mind was about to take hold of it again. He could feel the restlessness lurking in the base of his skull. He glanced up at Shaun. “Anything else I should know?”

  “About this? No. Except that you’ll have to hit Google on your spare time. I’ve got calls for all of you.”

  A chorus of groans rang out around the table.

  ***

  An hour later, Gabe steered his dark sedan carefully through the alleys of the Slip Mire, pulling up behind a squad car with its lights flashing. It sat a good fifty feet from the alley Gabe was headed for, which meant he had to park his car even farther away, but there was no way to get closer. A second squad car was parked horizontally across the mouth of the alley, and a crowd of Mirelings ten deep pressed in close to the cruiser, trying to get a better look.

  With the help of the uniforms, who stood on the sides of the squad car, keeping the crowd back, Gabe pushed through the throng and ducked into the alley. It was an odd set-up. Brick walls lined either side, with old, crumbling buildings leaning down over them, as though they, too, were peering into the alley. The opening Gabe passed through was really a make-shift hole in the brick.

  When he stepped through, the alley stretched horizontally in front of him. To his right, the brick walls disappeared completely, and smaller alleys branched off the main thoroughfare every twenty feet or so, vanishing between dilapidated buildings. There were too many openings to station a uniform at each one. Half a dozen of them had spread out over a fifty foot stretch which was cordoned off around the body. The uniforms watched the mouths of other alleys warily, ready to deal with anyone that might emerge and threaten the crime scene.

  A spotlight from the squad car Gabe passed lit up the normally dim alley, overpowering the red-tinted light of the district. Bailey, her blond hair tousled and hanging just below her shoulders, already squatted over the victim. A crime scene evidence collector that worked the night shift, Gabe saw her almost every time he got a new case.

  “Hey, Bailey.”

  She half-spun on her toe with a raised eyebrow, then flashed him a smile. “Gabe.” It faded quickly. “I heard about some disturbing evidence in your brother’s case. Sorry. That must be rough.”

  Gabe rolled his eyes. “You heard that already? I know Abstreuse’s finest can gossip with the best of them, but I just found out an hour ago.”

  Bailey gave a sheepish laugh and shrugged. “I’m sort of chummy with the lab techs.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway,” she turned back to her task—picking up strands of hair with tweezers and putting them in evidence collection bags—“I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it, but if there’s anything I can do…”

  Gabe fell into a squat beside her, letting out his breath. “I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do. Including me, which is the problem. But thank you. I appreciate it.”

  She gave him another quick smile.

  “So, what do we have?”

  “Nothing atypical for this part of town,” she said, her voice becoming serious.

  “Prostitute?” he asked, eying the dead woman’s clothes. She wore a blue-sequined tube top that looked purple under the red lights of the Mire, though the police spotlight showed its true color, and a dark miniskirt. Chin length, platinum blond hair framed her face, one that had ceased to be pretty years before. It was hard to put an age to her, though he doubted she was yet into her middle years. Her face looked sunken and gaunt. Her skin sallow, her arms
covered in needle marks. The lifestyles of the Mirelings often took a profound toll on their physical appearance.

  “Yeah, working girl,” Bailey said. She kept her voice low, though no one was close enough to hear them. A low buzz came from the on-looking crowd, and the uniformed cops were busy keeping them back. “No ID on the body. No money. No pockets at all, in fact.”

  “I don’t see any blood. Wounds?”

  Bailey shook her head. “Nothing open that I’ve found. Terrible bruising on the neck, though, especially over the hyoid bone.”

  Gabe nodded. “She was strangled.”

  “Looks like it, though we can’t say for sure if that was the C.O.D. until autopsy comes back.”

  “Is that her real hair?” Gabe asked. The platinum blond looked less than natural.

  “I haven’t checked yet. Might be a wig.” Bailey moved up closer to the woman’s head and gently dug her gloved fingers into the woman’s hairline, working her way back. “What do you know,” she said after several minutes. “It’s real hair. How’d she get her roots so well?”

  Gabe smirked, despite himself. Leave it to Bailey to wonder about that while leaning over a corpse. “What else?” he asked as she withdrew her hands from the dead woman’s hair.

  “Honestly, not much. There are signs of a struggle, but that’s to be expected. Not much else stands out to me.”

  “What signs of a struggle?”

  She pointed to the alley wall behind him. The old brick was blackened with years of age, dirt, smoke and grit. “Some blond hairs on that wall I haven’t collected, yet. I saw something colorful down there,” she pointed farther back into the alley. “I think it might be material ripped from her top.” She lifted the hem of the victim’s shirt so that Gabe could see where chunks of the fabric were missing.

  He nodded and looked at Bailey again, waiting for more.

  She met his eyes and gave him a helpless shrug. “Yeah, that’s really it, Gabe.”

  He gave a mirthless laugh.

  “I printed the body,” she shrugged again. “But didn’t get anything.”