The Killing Kind (31 page)

The phone’s screen read 911.

It was the message triggered by the panic button behind Lester’s bar.

A helpless dread gripped Hendricks. Lester was in trouble, and here he was five fucking hours away.

He climbed back into the Civic and eyed the backup on the thruway. Saw cars trying to leave the plaza’s parking lot idling as they waited for the chance to merge. Knew he’d go out of his mind sitting in traffic like that for the next five miles.

At the far end of the parking lot, there was a metal gate separating the plaza’s lot from the one its employees used, there to keep people on the toll road from leaving without paying. It was a risk. He could be seen. Reported. Chased. Arrested. And if that happened, Lester would be on his own.

With gritted teeth, he jerked the wheel toward the gate and hit the gas.

The gate slammed open, and he drove through—leaving the traffic jam behind and disappearing down the narrow access road.

Engelmann worked on Lester quietly and without urgency. His expression was one of both care and ecstasy—a master composer conducting his opus before a rapt audience of one. He’d told Lester at the outset that Lester was going to tell Engelmann everything there was to know about Hendricks. It wasn’t a question, Lester noted at the time, but in the agonizing hours that followed, it was as close as Engelmann ever came to asking one.

Lester, unlike Engelmann, was far from quiet. He screamed. He cried. He begged. He pleaded. Most were muffled by his makeshift gag—the lemon, at first, though he bit through it within the hour, at which point Engelmann replaced it with his own belt.

Not that Lester’s protestations mattered much. The Bait Shop was a sturdy old brick building, made to withstand Maine’s hard winters. The bar next door played host to a reggae band most Saturdays, today included. And once the dinner hour hit, the Old Port came alive, its streets full of tourists, buskers, and barhoppers. Anyone who heard Lester’s cries over the din failed to take notice.

Lester told himself all he had to do was stay strong. That Engelmann didn’t know about the panic button, or hadn’t realized Lester’d triggered it. If he could hold out long enough, Michael would come for him—even though Lester always told him if he ever got that message, he should run.

Mikey was still a soldier at heart—he’d never leave a man behind.

That thought carried him through the first excruciating hour. Taunted him for half the second. But eventually, Lester realized Michael would not come soon enough, so he began to root for Engelmann to get carried away and kill him inadvertently.

For a time, that grim strand of hope sustained him. But Engelmann was talented. Exacting. Creative. And Lester, for all his resolve, was no match for him. There was no shame in it. No betrayal. There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t sell out his own mother after two hours of Engelmann’s ministrations. Most wouldn’t last five minutes.

As the sun glinted orange off the western faces of the low-slung Portland skyline, Lester Meyers began to talk.

38

“My god,” said Thompson. “What happened here?” Thompson stood on the threshold of Henry Garfield’s bedroom, her hands sweating inside her disposable nitrile gloves, a pair of paper booties on her feet. Crime scene techs were everywhere, gowned and masked and solemn as they laid down numbered evidence markers and dusted surfaces for prints. The room flashed white as the crime scene photographer took photo after photo of the bodies.

The woman was unfamiliar to her. She lay on the bed, her throat slit, her naked flesh mottled. It looked like she’d been rolled over—there was relatively little blood beneath her, but the left side of the bed was soaked with it, and the floor beside as well.

Garfield was naked, too, and slumped at the foot of the bed, a gunshot to the center of his forehead. It looked like he’d been kneeling when he was shot.

Her question was more involuntary response than legitimate inquiry, but the DC homicide detective who’d greeted her at the door answered anyway. “We’re still piecing that together,” he said. “We just got here ourselves. No one seems to’ve heard the shot. Downstairs neighbor called it in when her ceiling started bleeding. When we found out he was one of yours, we figured we oughta loop you in.”

The detective had introduced himself when Thompson arrived, but she’d been in a fog. Now she struggled to remember his name. Newman? Newsome? Neubauer.

“Time of death?” she asked.

“Hard to say. Lividity’s fixed. Rigor mortis has set in. The bodies are room temp. I’m guessing it’s been twenty-four hours at least. The ME will probably be able to get us closer.”

Thompson’s heart sank. Twenty-four hours ago, Garfield had called her and asked for Hendricks’s file. She’d e-mailed it without a second thought. “That’s close enough,” she said.

“If it’s any consolation, your buddy didn’t suffer,” Neubauer said. “There’s no other trauma to the body. No defensive wounds to indicate a struggle. Just the gunshot. Stippling indicates it was close-range. He would’ve died immediately.”

Thompson shook her head. Garfield didn’t even put up a fight—he just gave the bastard what he wanted.

“Could be this was drug related,” Neubauer mused aloud. “We found some coke and paraphernalia on the nightstand.”

Thompson shook her head. “This wasn’t drug related.”

Neubauer scowled. “Look, I called you out of courtesy. If you know something you’re not telling me—”

But Thompson wasn’t listening. She was ringing up HQ. Three transfers later, she got someone on the line worth talking to. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “Henry Garfield is dead. Our ghost’s ID has been burned.” A pause. “I’m guessing it was the perp who flipped the ambulance.” Another pause. “Yeah. It’s bad. We’ve gotta get eyes on every Lester Meyers on our list ASAP.”

Michael Hendricks fought through the crush of drunken revelers that crowded the lamp-lit streets of Portland’s Old Port, his impatience tipping toward panic. Every glance his way felt hostile. Every idle bump was a potential threat. The live music blasting from open bar doors set his teeth on edge. The bass thump from the dance clubs knocked the breath from his chest.

A twenty-something meathead—popped collar and backward ball cap, tequila breath and cheap cologne— shouldered Hendricks hard as he staggered by.

“Watch it, dipshit!” he said.

Hendricks sized him up. Eyes glazed from drink. Veins bulging. Fists the size of country hams. He was clearly spoiling for a fight. Hendricks wasn’t keen to give him one, so he kept walking.

“Hey!” He wrapped a hand around Hendricks’s upper arm and yanked. “I was
talking
to you, asshole.”

As Hendricks turned, his right hand lashed out and grabbed Meathead’s trachea in a pinch grip. The guy let out a pained cry, which dwindled to a gurgle as Hendricks applied pressure. Hendricks knew he could crush the asshole’s windpipe easily. Leave him to choke to death in the street, where he’d be mistaken for another weekend drunk until it was too late. And for a moment, he was tempted.

But Lester was in trouble, so Hendricks couldn’t afford any complications. By force of will, he released the man, who backed—bug-eyed and gasping—into the throng.

When Hendricks finally reached the Bait Shop, it was shuttered and dark, and its sign read Closed—unheard-of on a Saturday night. Ten agonizing minutes spent surveilling the place indicated no discernible activity inside. Once he’d satisfied himself that no one lay in wait for him, he ducked into the alley that ran alongside the bar and used his key to slip in via the service entrance.

The first thing he noticed was the scent. Sweat and pennies, and beneath them, something even less pleasant, like garbage left too long. Though the gloom of the bar was impenetrable, Hendricks knew precisely what that olfactory cocktail signified. He’d smelled it more times than he wished to recall: sometimes on the field of battle, though more often in cold, gray, stone-walled basements—long shadows cast across the floor and walls by naked bulbs and naked zealots, strapped to chairs and taken apart piece by piece until they gave up either their secrets or their ghost. It was the scent of death drawn out—of a body letting go of blood and bile and bladder and bowels long before it’s granted the reprieve of death.

As Hendricks’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the lifeless form of his only friend swam slowly into focus. He was in the center of the restaurant’s small dining room, slumped forward in his wheelchair. A bar rag dangled from between his swollen, bloodied lips. The only thing that held him upright were the zip ties that bound his forearms to the wheelchair’s armrests, looped through the spokes of his wheels to keep him from rolling off, and cinched so tight his pained struggles had stripped skin from sinew like insulation from a wire. Hendricks felt sick as he took in the grisly scene: a blasphemous Rodin’s Thinker
,
an ode to suffering rendered in bound and bloodied flesh.

Hendricks ran to his friend’s side, tears welling as proximity revealed fresh horrors. Lester’s shirt lay in tatters on the floor around him, cut from his body by his assailant so that he could better access his living canvas. Lester’s chest was marked with plier-bites as if snacked on at leisure by some kind of carrion feeder, plucking flesh from bone here and there at random. A series of inch-long slices—fine, as if made by razor blade or surgical scalpel—etched his muscled shoulder like a woodcut. What should have been blood-caked was instead glazed and sticky, with a residue whose scent suggested whiskey—poured onto these cuts to inflict maximum pain. One ear dangled loose. Three fingers on his left hand were missing; a length of rubber hose was tied tight around his left elbow to prevent him from bleeding out as they’d been taken one by one. The floor before him was littered with teeth, pinkish-white amid the puddling scarlet. His skin was gray. His chest was still. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.

Hendricks crouched before Lester and touched his forehead to the dead man’s. “I’m sorry, Les,” he said, tears falling as he clenched shut his eyes—a vain attempt to keep his grief at bay. “I’m so sorry.”

So this is what this life he’d chosen had come to. What his bullshit quest for atonement—for absolution—had wrought. He’d once believed that God and country were worth killing for. After, when that moral certainty abandoned him, he thought that balancing the scales might make things right again. But now—too late, perhaps—he knew, as he wept over his departed friend, that his new crusade was as delusive as his last. There was only one thing in this world worth killing for—worth dyin
g
for. The lives of those you love.

He wished that he were dead instead. That the man who did this to Lester had bested him at Pendleton’s— or that he’d died alongside the rest of his unit in the high desert of Afghanistan. Then the horrors of the past three days would have never happened.

Could he die? he wondered. Or was he too good at this? Too tough? Too stubborn?

Apparently, Lester was.

Because at that moment, the broken man opened his eyes, spit the filthy, blood-caked rag out of his mouth, and began to scream.

It was a noise unlike any Hendricks had ever heard. Every one of Lester’s muscles clenched as he expelled breath from his lungs, and he thrashed violently against his restraints, loosing fresh gouts of blood from his many wounds and rocking his wheelchair so hard it nearly toppled.

Hendricks had no idea how Lester had survived this long. Had no idea how
anybody
could have. But by the look of him, and the severity of his wounds, his vise-grip on life wouldn’t hold for much longer.

“Jesus, Lester—I thought you were a goner!” Hendricks exclaimed. “Just hang on, buddy,” he said, plucking his phone from his pocket. “We’re gonna get you to a hospital.”

But Lester grabbed his wrist and held him fast. Through gritted teeth—what few he had left, at least—he barked
“NO!”
his voice hoarse and weak, his neck bulging from the exertion required to speak. Blood trickled from the corners of his swollen, ruined mouth.

Hendricks mistook Lester’s gesture as protective of Hendricks. “Don’t worry about me. All I care about is getting you—”

“NO,”
Lester once more insisted. He closed his eyes and focused. Then, calmer than he’d sounded prior, though thick and wrong from the trauma to his mouth, his face, he added, “Evie.”

Hendricks froze. Fear crawled up his spine like living ice.

“I’m sorry,” said Lester, tears streaking his blood-caked cheeks. “I tried to wait. I didn’t want to tell him...”