Kill Me Once Page 17

  Nathan hadn’t answered the old man, hadn’t bothered even turning around. He knew he was walking away from the devil already. Whether or not he’d walk the path of righteousness after taking those first few steps off his parents’ property had still remained to be seen at that point.

  To his great relief he finally found his place in the world when he got to Ohio. He was overjoyed to discover that he possessed a certain aptitude for the writing position to which he’d been assigned, not to mention an enviable talent for prising information out of even the most reluctant sources. He regularly scooped his competition at the newspaper in the neighbouring city on their shared crime beat, and he took a great deal of pride in that.

  True, things hadn’t always gone smoothly.

  Nathan was working at his desk one hot summer afternoon when the police scanner in the middle of the newsroom crackled out a report of a murder at a local motel, a disgusting hovel notorious for the drug-related slayings that seemed to take place there just about every other week. When the scanner went silent, his managing editor had looked around the newsroom for a moment before his gaze finally landed on Nathan. ‘Get on it now. Don’t bother coming back if you get scooped.’

  He’d arrived at the scene fifteen minutes later to find the parking lot buzzing with police and ambulances and various bystanders, most of them the drug-addicted denizens of the seedy motel itself. He’d talked to all of them, of course, which ended up yielding no usable information. As usual, the asshole cops weren’t cooperating with him at all.

  One drunken resident, a grizzled man in his late fifties who smelled as if he hadn’t taken a bath in a year, offered to supply Nathan with the inside story – the real story, the man whispered in his boozy voice – in exchange for a twelve-pack of beer. Full of a cub reporter’s desperate belief in journalistic ethics at the time, Nathan had thanked him politely and declined.

  The murder had taken place on the second floor of the two-storey motel, but the stairs leading up to the room were blocked off with yellow police tape so that avenue was a no-go.

  Half an hour after he’d arrived a large elderly black woman accompanied by three or four of her friends pulled up in a beat-up Cadillac. Cautiously approaching them with his notebook in hand, Nathan had identified himself as a reporter. ‘Can you tell me what happened in there, ma’am?’ he’d asked.

  The black woman looked up at him incredulously. Perhaps she was not used to talking to a white person, Nathan thought.

  ‘I’m his mama,’ the woman said, but the sound of her thick, fat-person’s voice made it very difficult to understand her.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said I’m his mama,’ the woman repeated.

  Finally understanding this, Nathan’s heart immediately leaped with visions of a front-page banner headline. The victim’s mother. The perfect source.

  Nathan’s pulse raced as he quickly pulled a pencil from behind his right ear and poised it over his notepad. ‘Can you tell me how it happened, ma’am?’

  The woman continued staring at him. ‘What in the hell are you talking about, motherfucker?’

  Suddenly realising that he was probably coming across as coarse and insensitive, Nathan did a quick rethink and tried again. ‘I’m very sorry about your loss,’ he said as gently as possible.

  What happened next shocked him right down to his very soul. First the old woman’s face collapsed. The next thing he knew, she was falling to the pavement and shrieking out in grief. ‘My baby! My baby! Oh my God! Oh my sweet Jesus! They killed my baby! They killed my baby!’

  It wasn’t until after her friends had helped her to her feet and back to the car that Nathan discovered she’d been called to the scene on the simple possibility that it had been her son who’d been murdered. As things turned out, that had been the case, but Nathan had inadvertently been the one to inform her of this, which had certainly been neither his function nor his intention.

  As he walked slowly away from her, stunned beyond belief, one of the asshole cops grinned at him. ‘Got any more questions there, Scoop?’

  By the time Nathan finally regained enough of his composure to resume his sniffing around, the coroner informed him that the victim had had his head cut off for infringing on a rival drug dealer’s territory.

  ‘Typical shit,’ the coroner said off the record. ‘Promise me you’ll never stay in a place like this, son. This kind of shit always happens in dumps like this.’

  Nathan promised that he wouldn’t.

  As fate would have it, the photographer assigned to cover the scene with him that day had captured the entire embarrassing incident reel by reel. Returning to the newsroom an hour later, Nathan was caught completely off guard by the loud, derisive cheer from his fellow journalists that suddenly went up.

  Mortified, he saw the stop-action scenes pinned frame by frame across the large bulletin board in the centre of the room:

  Nathan approaching the woman, notebook in hand.

  The look of confusion on the old woman’s face.

  Nathan’s declaration of condolence.

  The woman’s face collapsing; the can of Dr Pepper flying from her hand and staining Nathan’s clean white dress shirt as she fell to the ground.

  Nathan leaning down to help the woman to her feet, the look of chagrin clearly evident on his face.

  The very last frame showed the grieving mother being led away by her friends, turning around to look over her shoulder at Nathan Stiedowe – the man who’d just informed her that her only son had been murdered.

  He knew the image would remain etched in his mind for ever. At one point, the incident had bothered him to the point of interrupting his sleep.

  It didn’t bother him so much any more.

  Following those initial growing pains, Nathan had steadily risen to become one of the top reporters in the city – a big fish in a very small pond, admittedly. But it didn’t take long to figure out that the editors who bossed him around weren’t there because of any sort of journalistic talent they possessed.

  No, as was the case in most of the smaller newsrooms across the country you rose through the ranks simply by sticking around long enough in a place that paid like shit, treated you like shit and cranked out reams of shit stories on a daily basis until they had to promote you. And in the wide world of journalism, Nathan soon discovered that you couldn’t swing a stick in a full circle without hitting some asshole who had absolutely no business telling you what to do.

  When the Plain Dealer recruited him a year later he’d happily jumped ship and moved to Cleveland. The bitter lifers in Shockley didn’t even bother saying goodbye to him as he walked out the door on his last day, but he didn’t mind. Their punishment was their simple station in life. They were stuck. He wasn’t. He had talent. They didn’t. They resented that, and he resented them. It was a match made in hell.

  At the PD, things really began falling into place for Nathan. Things were more professional there, the people in charge actually seeming to know what the hell they were talking about for the most part. In addition to quickly making a name for himself in the western suburbs of Cuyahoga County, it wasn’t long before he met Kelly, a pretty little intern from Walsh University.

  He’d first noticed the young redhead as she was neatly arranging her desk on a cool spring day. She was obviously the kind of girl who couldn’t stand clutter – the kind who had to rise from her chair and pluck a stray piece of paper off the floor if it happened to fall in the line of her peripheral vision – and that drew him to her as insistently as a moth drawn to a flame.

  Three months of dating followed before he proposed to her in the kitchen of his small apartment. ‘The Rainbow Connection’ – her favourite song – was playing on the living-room stereo as he got down on one knee. A year later Jennifer was born. She was the prettiest baby Nathan had ever seen.

  Things had been good then. Things had been perfect, actually.

  But that was before he’d come home late from work one nig
ht to find himself lost in the worst nightmare of his entire life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Out in the bustling terminal at Hopkins, Dana powered on her cellphone and saw that she had a missed call from Crawford. She found a quiet table tucked away in the corner fifty yards from the main concourse and called him back on his own cell.

  ‘Bell here,’ he said.

  ‘Crawford, it’s Dana. What’s up?’

  Crawford blew out a slow breath. ‘Not sure if you’re going to like this, Dana. You got a minute?’

  Cold dread spread through her limbs like icy fingers fluttering over a dead body. ‘Yeah. What’s up?’

  Crawford cleared his throat. ‘Well, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. Which do you want first?’

  ‘The good news. I really think I need it right now.’

  Crawford laughed. ‘I figured you’d say that. Anyway, the good news is that I talked Bill Krugman into letting you stay on the case. At least for now. He was a hundred per cent against it but I managed to sway him.’

  ‘How’d you do that?’

  Crawford paused. ‘Well, that’s what I’m hoping you don’t think the bad news is. Krugman wants me to join you on the investigation, officially. Help out if I can. You have a problem with that?’

  Dana considered the question. Did she have a problem with it? A few months ago she’d have jumped at the chance, even though she was doing just fine on her own. But now things felt different between her and Crawford. She’d noticed a certain aloofness in him. Perhaps she’d imagined it but she didn’t think so. Still, he was one of the very best agents the FBI had. And she had to face it, she needed all the help she could get. Besides, she got the impression she didn’t have any choice in the matter. And they’d been a good team once. They could be again.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told Crawford now. ‘Of course I want your help. Speaking of your help, what’s the word on the profile? It would be a huge boost if I knew something concrete about this guy’s psychology. I feel like I’m shooting in the dark at this point.’

  Crawford was silent. Dana could hear him breathing on the other end of the phone. She waited. Eventually he spoke. ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Dana. I haven’t been able to compile a profile yet. I’ve been dealing with some other things.’

  Dana couldn’t believe her ears. She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. ‘Like what, Crawford? We’re chasing a serial killer here. Don’t you think that should be Priority Number One?’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Crawford said, his voice breaking. He coughed and continued. ‘I haven’t been feeling all that well lately. After you left for Los Angeles I went to the doctor to find out what the hell’s wrong with me. They did a CAT scan and an MRI and a bunch of other tests.’ He paused, then after a short hesitation began again. ‘Look, Dana, I’m sorry to tell you on the phone like this but it turns out I have terminal brain cancer. They’re giving me six months to live.’

  Dana almost dropped the phone in shock. Hot tears flooded into her eyes. ‘Oh my God, Crawford. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. But what the hell can you do, right? When it’s your time, it’s just your time. Anyway, I really think working on this case will be good for me. Sort of help me keep my mind off the other stuff going on, you know what I mean?’

  Dana didn’t know what to say. He sounded oddly detached, matter-of-fact, but perhaps that was the only way he could deal with a death sentence like this. She was no medical expert, but she’d heard that brain cancer could sometimes wreak havoc on people’s minds, making them unable to think clearly. If that was the case here, she didn’t want Crawford to further endanger his health by getting mixed up in all this. She didn’t even want to think about what losing him was going to mean to her. He’d been like a father to her all these years. ‘Is Bill Krugman signing off on this?’ she asked, just about keeping her emotions in check. Now was not the time for her to break down. Crawford would need her to be strong. He’d expect her to be.

  ‘Actually, I haven’t told him yet. And I’m not going to. You’re the only one who knows at this point, Dana. I want to keep it that way. You can’t tell anyone.’

  A single tear spilled out of Dana’s right eye and down her cheek. She had her own secrets to keep, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to rat out her mentor and former partner after what he’d just told her, not after everything he’d done for her over the years. Once again, the rule book could just go out the window at this point.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she promised. ‘So, where do you want to start?’

  ‘I was thinking maybe I could fly up to Cleveland and help you check out the house where the phone call came from,’ Crawford said. ‘I could be there in a couple of hours, if that’s OK with you.’

  Dana paused. She’d wanted to check out the house for herself first, knowing how emotionally hard it would be on her. If Crawford were there with her, she knew he’d sense that something was wrong and call her out on it. Sick or not, Crawford had the ability to see through her like he would through a sheet of glass. At the moment he hadn’t connected the number with the address – he’d know exactly what house it was when he saw that. He knew the contents of that file almost as intimately as she did. But what in the hell could she say at this point? Her hands were tied. She’d just have to get there first and explain later.

  ‘That’ll be fine,’ she told Crawford. ‘I was planning on heading home first for a little bit before I go over there, anyway.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘It’s eleven a.m. now. Could you meet me there around three-thirty?’ That should buy her enough time, she reckoned.

  ‘Of course. I’ll see you then. Text me the address. And Dana?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Thanks, partner. I really need this.’

  Dana flipped the cellphone off and closed her eyes. Just what else was the man upstairs going to throw at her next? She was hanging by a thread as it was. And now the man who’d been there for her, who’d encouraged her when she’d nearly given up, had just told her he had six months to live.

  Could it get any worse?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  It was the night of his and Kelly’s second anniversary when Nathan finally returned home from work just as the clock’s hands were nearing eleven p.m. He glanced down at his watch and desperately hoped that Kelly wouldn’t be too upset with his tardiness on their special day.

  To guard against this possibility he held a large bouquet of fresh calla lilies – her favourite flowers – in one hand while he fished in his coat pocket for his apartment key with the other. He slid the silver key into the lock and was surprised to find the door simply pushed open.

  Nathan let out an irritated breath. How many goddamn times did he have to warn Kelly about locking their door at night? That living downtown wasn’t always the safest place to be? Although perfect in just about every other respect, actually following through on things had never been one of his lovely wife’s greatest qualities.

  He walked into their modest apartment, surprised and a bit hurt to find that she hadn’t waited up for him. Then again, Jennifer was teething now, so that milestone probably wore away at his wife’s frazzled nerves every bit as much as it did at their sweet baby’s tender little gums.

  He called out tentatively anyway, not wanting to wake Jennifer in case she’d just fallen asleep. ‘Kelly? Honey? I’m home.’

  There was no answer; not a sound in the entire apartment save for the rhythmic ticking of the mantel clock. Nathan’s heart thrummed painfully in his chest as he tossed the flowers onto the kitchen table and quickly hurried through the darkness to the open doorway of their bedroom.

  He peered in and let out a grateful sigh of relief when he saw his wife and beautiful little baby girl curled up in bed together.

  They were fast asleep.

  Smiling down at them, Nathan couldn’t resist flipping on the light for a better look at the two loves of his life.
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br />   CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Dana had packed light – just the one carry-on bag – so she didn’t have to stop by to visit the baggage-claim area. Instead, she fought her way through the crowded terminal and took her place waiting in line for the string of yellow cabs outside. When it was her turn, she climbed inside an ancient vehicle that smelled like at least fifty cartons’ worth of stale cigarette smoke and wrinkled her nose up against the odour as she gave the driver directions to her modest apartment complex in Lakewood, a suburb on the western outskirts of Cleveland.

  Half an hour later the driver pulled up to the kerb in front of her building. Dana fumbled in her purse for a fifty to pay him with before she hastily hopped out.

  She breathed in several deep lungfuls of fresh air as she made her way to the front doors, infinitely happy to finally be out of the stinky cab. But her brain felt hardboiled as she punched the button in the elevator for the fourth floor in the nine-storey complex. In her heart of hearts, Dana knew that she should probably be heading out to Chicago immediately, but she felt that she should be the one to check out the house where the call had come from – the home of her childhood. Maybe it wasn’t at the top of the investigating team’s to-do list, but they had to pick up on any and every possible link. And something was drawing her back. She had to go back. Besides, Brown had arranged for details around all the major hospitals in Chicago, where Dana suspected the Cleveland Slasher – she still thought of him as that, original monikers tended to stick – might strike next in order to recreate the crimes of serial killer Richard Speck. It wasn’t as if they weren’t following all the proper procedures. Plus, Crawford himself hadn’t said anything to question the course of action. Instead, he was coming out to Cleveland to assist Dana in working the investigation. Crawford was the best agent she’d ever known, and he would have immediately questioned the trip to Cleveland if he had thought it was a wild-goose chase.