Killing Hope (Gabe Quinn Thriller) (66 page)

There was bright sticky blood everywhere. It looked like a somebody had thrown red paint all over the show. Pooled on the floor. Smeared over the kitchen counters, utensils, appliances. Congealed blood and bits of matter. Soufflé skin and tangled hair. A few whiter fragments jutting out of the pool on the floor that could be bone. Lumps of thicker material that could be brain matter. The only object in the kitchen devoid of blood spatter was the chair itself. The chair in which Stacey had sat while her killer had gone to town on her.

A black metal urn stood on breakfast bar. It was covered in coagulated blood. He could see strips of scalp and blonde hair matted up in the gooey mess. More clots of jellied brain matter.

The killer had beaten Stacey to a pulp with the ashes of her father.

Michael Shakes tasted bile in his throat.

Stacey had been a pain in the ass, but she hadn’t deserved this ending. The killer had pulverizing her head. Smashing her skull into a hundred pieces. He wondered for how much of it she’d been conscious.

He fingered the slip of paper in his pocket. The slip of paper containing the information he had deliberated over all week. The slip of paper revealing the identity of the body that Stacey Kellerman had found in a snowy ditch out near Red Rock on the coldest Monday of the week. Information he could no longer share with her.

Detective Michael Shakes screwed the paper into a ball and dropped it in the trash on his way out.

187

^{___________________________}

I got a call from Mike Shakes about forty minutes later. He’d visited the Kellerman crime scene while Sonny had used her leverage with the CSU to find out what incriminating evidence, if any, the Feds had uncovered.

‘The place is a bloodbath.’ Shakes was telling me. I could hear he was rattled by what he’d seen. He kept catching his breath, gulping. ‘Whoever killed Stacey worked her over real good. There was blood all over the place. Never seen so much blood.’

‘He bludgeoned her to death.’

‘With an urn containing her father’s ashes, no less. He mashed her head up so bad the CSU reckon if she’d been found anywhere else we wouldn’t have been able to identify her.’

I swallowed over a tacky tongue.

‘So did Sonny find anything out?’

‘Only that the Feds recovered a bloodied Band-Aid from the crime scene. It was clutched in Stacey’s hand.’

‘That’s all they have?’

‘Gabe, they’re adamant it’s all they need. It’s got your blood on it.’

I was stunned. ‘They ran the DNA?’

‘In record time. Your favorite agent came down heavy on the Crime Lab nightshift. Promising either big bonuses or final pay checks – depending on their co-operation. They turned around the results in less than five hours flat.’

‘And they’re certain it’s my DNA?’

‘Sonny double-checked the evidence. She said the match came back positive against Gabriel Quinn, Senior Detective, Homicide Division, LAPD.’

Guilty as charged.

Wong had just become my nemesis.

‘Any idea how it got there?’ Shakes asked.

‘No.’

‘Sonny said you had a Band-Aid on your cheek when she first met you Friday.’

Shakes had to follow through. I’d have done the same.

‘Sonny’s right. It was helping heal a bullet nick I caught earlier in the week. I took it off in my room at the Luxor.’

 
‘So how did the killer get a hold of it?’

‘He must have been in my room,’ I realized out loud. ‘Maybe when Housekeeping were making up the bed.’

‘Wow, Gabe. That’s some smart premeditation. Your boy’s either seriously deranged or seriously dangerous.’

‘Both.’ I said. ‘Do we have a time of death?’

‘The ME puts the TOD at late Friday afternoon. Give or take.’ I heard him pause. Pauses mean trouble. ‘Remember where you were Friday afternoon?’

I mulled it over. ‘With you, I guess. At the place with the fountains out front.’

‘That’s right. The Bellagio crime scene. How about before then?’

‘With Hal Beecham, at the Channel Ten Studios.’

‘Who’s already made a statement to the Feds saying you paid him a visit after seeing Stacey’s newscast, by the way. Says you were all fired up and wanted to grind an axe.’

‘He’s right, in one sense. I wanted to speak with Kellerman. But only to find out who her source is.’

‘Which led you where?’

‘A tattoo parlor on Las Vegas Boulevard.’

‘Where two more witnesses saw you assault Stacey.’

It sounded bad. I would have arrested me, too.

‘One of which is Hugh Winters’ daughter, by the way.’

‘Roberta?’

I had no idea. Last time I’d seen her she’d been a baby. Roberta’s testimony alone was enough to seal my fate.

‘I was just trying to speak with Kellerman.’ I said.

‘So where did you go next?’

A fiery lance seared my chest.

‘To Stacey’s place.’

188

^{___________________________}

I leave conspiracy theories to those who know best. People like Dreads. I believe we stepped foot on the Moon and I don’t buy there was a shooter on the grassy knoll. Things start falling apart when conspiracies get personal. Hypocritical, I know. But being framed for murder carries that kind of weight.

 
The Undertaker
had been in my hotel room. Stolen the discarded Band-Aid. Then planted it at a crime scene. Presumably to cement my guilt. And it had worked. Which meant he’d planned Stacey’s murder well in advance. Planned to set me up for it all along. The fact I’d happened to be there at the same time was …

Coincidence?

‘I don’t get it.’ I said to Mike Shakes down the phone. ‘Why frame me? To get me off the case? Mission accomplished. So why get me on the case to begin with?’

‘To set you up.’

‘You mean he wanted to frame me for murder all along and that’s why he involved me from the get-go?’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying, Gabe. But it’s a possibility.’

‘Damn.’

‘Want me to get you an attorney?’

‘Are things looking that bad?’

‘Hugh Winters is a weasel. You should never underestimate vermin. Think about it.’

I did.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘he called my cell again, about an hour ago.’

‘Who?’

‘The Undertaker.’

‘Which proves the Feds got the wrong man. What now?’

‘You and Sonny keep working on clearing my name. In the meantime, I’ll work on finding the killer’s true identity.’

189

^{___________________________}

Thousands of feet below, the snow-locked Rockies slid silently beneath the plane. There were patterns in the vaporous clouds clinging to the shattered peaks: a train derailment in Delhi; a mining disaster in Kiev; the face of a man plotting a presidential assassination. The killer known internationally as
The Undertaker
pulled down the window blind and blinked. Waiting for his eyes to adjust before refocusing on the photographs confiscated from Officer Garcia’s purse.

It was strange seeing the bodies drenched in the cold light cast by the Forensics’ lamps. To see the little yellow marker tents with their big black numbers, strategically placed around the bodies like flags on a map. Violating his personal creations. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but now he could see why he’d been nailed with the mortician moniker. The way he’d arranged each scene would be important to those hunting him. But they would never figure out the truth.

He’d been no more than nine or ten at the time.

There was a ramshackle shack hidden deep in the woods. A couple of miles north of town. Through dense brush and over rocky outcrops. One of those secluded places that was hard to reach without amassing plenty of scrapes and bruises. The shack was a single-roomed construction of silvered wood. An old hunter’s cabin – easily a hundred years old. Dead rabbits strung from shrugging eaves. Smoke curling from a rusty pipe stack. The other kids spoke only of it in their ghost stories, nervously circulated around locker rooms on dark afternoons. Like it was part of an urban legend. Nobody went anywhere near it.

An old, twisted woman lived in the remote shack. A witch – or so the other kids said. Mad as a hatter. He’d spent several weeks watching her skin rabbits with her broken teeth, collect wind-fallen branches in the hammock of her apron, stand buck naked in the rain chanting angry incantations at the thundering skies. She was as mad as a hatter, all right. But he’d seen no evidence of her casting spells.

He had seen her patterns, though. Repeated routines. Like a clockwork doll going through the motions, day in day out. He’d studied them for hours. Learned where she’d be at any given moment. Got comfortable with the structure, the predictability. Even started enjoying his time spent watching her go through the same familiar activities day after day. Then, one Sunday evening at the beginning of May, the patterns had stopped.

She should have been pulling water from the well. Cursing and sweating. But instead she was slumped in the rickety swing at the corner of the porch. Eyes glazed. Mouth tugged to one side by gravity and the looseness of her jaw.

He’d seen dead people before – but not in real life.

When he’d returned the following evening she was still slumped in the swing. Only this time her feet were bloated. Yellowy-purple. And there were flies buzzing in and out of her mouth.

On the third evening he’d advanced slowly. Heart hammering. Taking small, quiet, tentative steps. Each one bringing more of the inanimate woman into view. She’d looked as dead as a doorknob. A waxwork with blue-cheese skin. Flies scuttling over her milky eyeballs.