Detective Kate Morgan walked into the jail cell and asked for the prisoner she had sent to sober up. She was given the log-in book to take a look at. She identified the prisoner and asked to speak with him, then headed over to the interview room she had been assigned and sat down, waiting.
Soon the prisoner walked in on his own accord, looking a little sheepish and red-eyed. He sat down nervously on the chair across the table from her. “Good morning, ma’am,” he started.
She looked at him in surprise and just waited.
He winced. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the streets, but I ain’t never seen anything like that.”
“Hopefully you’ll never see it again either,” she replied in a quiet voice.
He nodded. “I know. Look. It wasn’t the right thing under the circumstances, but I just couldn’t think of anything to do but drink enough to stop seeing that. Turns out it was burned into my brain.” He wiped his mouth and cleared his throat a couple times. “Could I possibly get a drink of water?”
She nodded, then walked to the door and asked for water for the interviewee. When it was delivered in a bottle, he uncapped it and drank. She watched, as he gulped the bulk of it in one sitting, then wiped his mouth again.
“Thank you,” he said. “Nothing like alcohol to make your throat dry.”
She wanted to ask why he continued to drink, if that were the case, but she had come to accept it as one of those things. It didn’t matter what answer he gave; the addiction was real. Or almost as uncontrollable as anything else in life. She pulled her notepad toward her and picked up the pen. “Now tell me. What did you see?”
“The devil,” he replied instantly. “No doubt in my mind, the devil himself was there last night.”
She put down the pen, crossed her arms, and looked at him.
He immediately held up his hand. “I get it. You don’t believe me. But I’m telling you, it was the devil.”
“And what was he doing?”
“Nothing good,” he stated.
“Did you see him kill that woman?”
The witness immediately shook his head. “Nope, nope, nope, nope. I didn’t see nothing like that.”
“So then what did you see?”
“He came out of the alleyway, wearing a big cloak and a mask with horns,” he told her.
“So this devil wore the devil’s mask?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It looked really real.”
She nodded and put down a couple simple notes. “Any idea how tall he was? How big he was? Did he hold anything in his hand? Did you see him bring in the woman?”
“Nope,” he answered. “I was just sitting there, snoozing, then I heard a weird thunk, thunk, thunk sound and heard him saying something. When I looked around the corner—from where I was hiding farther down the alleyway—he stood in front of the dumpster, his hands on his hips like this.” Her interviewee hopped up, put his hands on his hips, and glared, as if the table were the dumpster.
“So he was pissed?”
He nodded. “He looked like it. But he had on this weird mask, like I said. And the way he was standing there, I didn’t really see his face. So I don’t know if it was anger for sure, but that’s what it seemed like,” he explained apologetically.
“And, if you did see his face, what would you have seen?”
He shrugged. “Well, it would have been just the mask.”
“Height?”
“I’m thinking around six foot,” he guessed.
“And you figured that out how?”
“Well, he could rest his arms easily on the top of the dumpster.”
That she wrote down. “Did he have anything in his hands or anything with him?”
He shook his head. “Not that I saw.”
“Did he come past you?”
He shook his head. “Nope, nope, no way. I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I would have been out of there beforehand, but, when I saw him heading down to the other end, I let him go, and then I called the police.”
“But you didn’t call the police right away, did you?”
He looked around nervously.
“Because first you wanted to see what he put in the dumpster, didn’t you?”
The guy lifted his gaze, and she saw the haunted look in his eyes.
“Well, he cured me of that.” His voice was harsh, almost guttural in tone. “Because what I saw is something I won’t ever unsee.”
As she remembered the poor woman with the visible torture evident on her body, she could only agree with him. “What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing.” He laughed. “That was all.”
“Did he stop on the way as he left? Did he throw anything on the way out of the alley? Did he turn and look back?”
“No, he just walked away.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “And there’s nothing else you can tell me?”
He shook his head. “No, he wore this long thing that looked like a cloak and the mask, but that was it.”
“Did he have the mask on when you first saw him?”
He frowned. “I don’t know.” He paused. “He also had this, you know, like a big hood on the long coat.”
“So, was it a cape or a coat?”
He shrugged.
“But it had a hood? So how do you know he wore a devil’s mask?”
“Because he pushed the hood off his head, when he looked up at the sky. Remember when I said he was standing, his hands on his hips, as if he was frustrated, angry, or something?”
“Got it,” she muttered, wishing there was more. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but when did any of this shit make sense? She wrote down the name of her witness. “Do you have an address? Somewhere you stay?”
“Not for a very long time,” he answered.
“Do you stay at any of the shelters?”
“When I can get a bed. Other than that, I just go from park to park.”
She sighed and sat back. “Was anybody else there around at the time?”
“Nope. Just me.”
“You don’t have any friends you hang out with?”
“I do, but I had a full bottle of booze,” he explained. “Matter of fact, I was supposed to go share it, but I drank it all, after seeing that dumpster last night.” He shook his head. “I knew I wouldn’t be welcome if they found out I’d done that.”
“Well, you also spent the day in the tank.”
“And thank you for that,” he said. “It was nice and dry.”
She sighed. “You know that we could give you a hand to get you dried out.”
“There have been lots of hands over the years.” He sniffled, his eyes turning rheumy with emotions. “Ain’t none of them ever took yet.”
“Doesn’t mean they can’t,” she argued.
“Maybe,” he muttered. “But I’d have to give up the one thing that’s been good to me.”
“You mean, the bottle?” she asked gently.
He nodded. “Yeah, she’s always there for me.”
“But she’s a bitch in the morning,” Kate added, with a note of humor.
He looked at her, and a bright smile flashed on his face. “That she is,” he noted affectionately, “but she’s my bitch.”
And that was about the truth of it. After he was gone, Kate returned to her department. As she walked to the bullpen, she picked up a coffee, wondering how, ever since the team had all come to terms, there was always coffee now.
As she neared her desk, her landline was ringing. She groaned, raced over, and grabbed it. “Detective Kate Morgan here.”
Dr. Smidge was on the other end. “I’ve got your DB from this morning on the table.”
“Already? It must be almost like a holiday down there.”
“Not likely,” he snapped. “A couple things you should probably go over.”
“I’m on my way,” she replied. “Give me half an hour.”
“That’s all right. I got lots of paperwork and plenty to deal with.”
When he hung up the phone, she turned and looked over at Rodney. “That was Dr. Smidge. He’s got this morning’s victim on the table, and he wants me to go over there for some reason.”
At that, Rodney looked up, startled.
“I know. Most of the time he’s kicking us out of there.”
“How did it get on his table so fast?”
“I asked him that and made a smart remark about it must be a holiday if he’s already up to this patient, but he didn’t seem to appreciate it.”
“Well, that’s nothing new either.” Rodney hopped up to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”
“You got anything else to do at the same time?”
“Go back over the crime scene,” he replied, with a shrug. “A couple statements that I wouldn’t mind going over.”
“Locals?”
“Some people saw something a couple blocks away.”
“A couple blocks away?” She frowned as they walked out of the office. She looked longingly at the cup of coffee sitting and cooling on her desk.
He stopped her, pointing at the coffee. “Look. You can have a few minutes to drink it, if you want.” She hesitated, and he said, “Stop. You know this isn’t just about getting to the bottom of it. It’s also about not killing ourselves in the process.” She shot him a look, and he nodded. “Think about it. We won’t be doing the victim any good if we get there out of sorts. It won’t be any picnic to see that again. Best that we’re calm, collected, and pulled together. And, for you, that means, grab your damn coffee.”
She walked back to her desk, picked it up, and had several sips. Her computer wasn’t even on yet. She looked around at the bullpen. “Where are the others?”
“Two were in with the sergeant,” Rodney noted quietly.
“Problems?”
“No. One needs some personal time off. One’s trying to arrange some holidays. Owen was in, and then he headed out to talk to a couple constables, doing some of the canvassing last night.”
“On the same case?”
Rodney nodded. “He’s the one who phoned in to say that somebody a couple blocks away had heard and seen something suspicious.”
She shook her head. “Why a couple blocks away?”
He pulled out his phone, looked up the statement he wanted, and replied, “There was a pickup rumbling around the streets, going around the block several times, as if looking for something. He noted it because of a funky tarp in the back—something rolled up.”
“So you’re thinking it might have been the body in the back?”
“That’s what Owen was wondering. Anyway, he went down to talk with our witness this morning before work and confirmed the model of the vehicle. It was an old Chevy with a rusted-out muffler, so it was making more noise than it needed to. A pickup bed with no liner, unless it was a sprayed-on black one, and then a bright green tarp in the back.”
“We found no tarp at the scene,” she murmured.
“And the Chevy was black, with a little bit of white trim around the rims.”
“So, old rims?”
“It could have been. It’s hard to say. They could have just been dirty. They could have been white rims and just really muddy.”
She nodded. “And then what? He comes down to this area, starts running around, looking at things, looking for a place to dump a body maybe?”
“That’s what Owen was wondering.”
“Where is he now?”
“Remember the case we had last week? The one with a couple rocks thrown off one of the bridges and hitting a pedestrian down below?” he asked. “He got a line on that one.”
“That pedestrian didn’t die, did she?”
“No, but she was a friend of his.”
“Ah, it’s funny how friends completely change everything.”
“Well, they’re not supposed to,” he noted, with a smile. “Yet there has to be a little bit of leeway in what we do. This isn’t just a job for today. It’s a long-term gig for us.”
“Exactly.” She tossed back the last of her coffee, put down her cup, and said, “Let’s go.”
As they headed toward the morgue, they found parking in the back of the hospital and walked down to the basement via the tunnel, where the morgue was situated. She knocked on the doors of the offices, and, when there was no answer, she turned the knob and stepped through, but the rooms were empty. She rolled her eyes and headed down to where the real action was.
“You were really thinking he’d be in the office?” Rodney asked, with a grin.
“He’s never in his office, is he? But it’s before the rest of it, so you always think you have to start there.”
“I don’t know. I think I would just completely ignore offices at this point and head down to his little corner,” Rodney explained. And that’s what they did anyway.
When she stepped through the double doors, Dr. Smidge looked up and frowned. “Gown up. Make sure you scrub down well.”
She walked over, scrubbed her arms, put on a gown, grabbed gloves, and headed toward him. Smidge only ever requested this when he wanted her to see and to touch the body. She knew that Rodney would stay a little farther back because he couldn’t stand this part. As she stepped up to the autopsy table, Smidge pulled the sheet off the victim. She sucked in her breath.
“What do you notice?” he asked her.
She shot him a look. “One of the first things is,” she stated boldly, “now that she’s been washed, what was done to her is so damn clear.”
“Well, it’s clear, but it’s not clear,” he argued. “You see the visible trauma without all the blood everywhere.”
“The blood was bad enough,” she murmured. “At the scene it looked horrific. Now it’s like cold and clinical.”
He nodded. “Which is a good thing because it allows us to see more. So what do you see?”
Kate studied the body, pointed out the wrists, with fractures, the ankles both broken. A shin fracture had a bone showing. The breast area she had to force herself to look at. “Completely cut off as a circle,” she noted, peering forward. “It’s a weird hollow though.”
“Yeah, that’s what they look like after breast implants.” Her gaze immediately went to the second one and then back to the first one, and he nodded. “She had both breasts done.”
“Have you taken out the other one?”
“Not yet.” He pointed. “Does it look like it’s out?”
She could feel herself flushing because, of course, it wasn’t. “You can ID her based on those, right?”
“Yep, when I get there,” he stated. “What else do you notice?”
“Well, her throat.” She paused. “But the wound looks odd. That didn’t do more than cause her a lot of pain and possibly knock her out, but it’s not the cause of death.” She pointed to the higher-up slash.
“Vocal cords,” he noted quietly.
“Right, so we were on target with that one.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Therefore, she couldn’t have screamed.”
“Any idea when?”
“Probably midscream,” he stated boldly, “realizing that he would have to minimize the noise.”
“Or first off?”
Dr. Smidge shrugged. “Either way, it’s effective.”
“And doesn’t she then feel like she’s drowning in her own blood?” she asked.
“Absolutely, but she would have still been alive.”
Kate winced. “Even with the heavy blood loss from all these injuries?” She shook her head. “The human body is amazingly resilient.”
“If she’d been alive, we could have saved her, and all these injuries would have healed. Obviously the vocal cords would be an interesting conundrum to repair, depending on how much time had lapsed before we got her. But medicine has come a very long way.”
“So, cause of death?”
He pointed at the missing right breast. “Besides the fact that it’s got an odd shape, do you notice anything else?”
She bent over, and he pulled back the tissue against the bone, and there was a hole, right through to the chest underneath.
“Bullet?” Then she frowned. “No, what’s that? It’s almost like a—” She thought about it, shook her head. “It’s almost like somebody took a knitting needle and poked it through her chest.”
He looked at her in surprise and then nodded. “Bull’s-eye.”
She stared at him in shock. “Somebody rammed a knitting needle between her ribs and into her heart?”
“Yes, it punctured her heart and went right through into her back.”
“Jesus,” she muttered. “And I suppose …” And she didn’t even finish the sentence because, of course, the poor woman would have been awake—not awake necessarily, but she would have been alive when this was done to her. “That sounds terrible,” she murmured.
“Yes. On top of that, we also have some burns.” He raised one of the deceased’s arms, so that Kate could see the back of the broken wrists. “These are cigarette burns. Found a couple on her cheek, a couple on her hand, a couple on her knees and—a couple on the pubis.”
She looked down to see that, indeed, some pubic hair looked like it had been burned off. “He burned off her pubic hair?” she asked in astonishment.
“Probably wanted to see if it would burn,” he noted bluntly.
“Great.” She raised her hand to her chest.
“So we have a sadist, who wanted to bring maximum pain to this poor woman.”
“That’s what it would look like, yes. But—” She stopped, hesitating.
“But what?” he barked.
“Tox screen?”
“In progress,” he replied. “And we can only hope that she was in some way drugged, but, because of her injuries, she wouldn’t have done any fighting anyway.”
Kate looked at the horribly broken wrists and nodded. “Even if she lifted her arms and tried to flail at him, she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “It does look like her wrists were bound, so she was tied up—at least part of the time. The restraints would have been placed around where the fractures were.”
“Any chance she’d have broken them, trying to get free?”
He looked at her with respect. “It’s possible, except for the fact that these are open fractures.”
“So, what happened?”
“In this case, I would suspect either a slice or a heavy object caused the fractures. The rest of her injuries were drier and less interesting. All it really reveals is that this guy held her for hours, possibly days, getting extreme pleasure in tormenting her.”
When the coroner covered up the woman again, Kate finally stepped back, disposing of her gloves and gown. She stood at the doorway, her hands in her pockets, and looked at the rows and rows of bodies stored here. “Why did you choose this one?” He ignored her for the moment, and she realized something was important here. “Dr. Smidge,” she called out, her voice slightly sharper.
At that, several other people in the same room lifted their heads and looked at her. Smidge looked up and glared.
She shook her head. “Here or your office.”
His eyebrows shot up, and his glare heightened into almost fierce proportions.
Beside her, Rodney whispered, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool it, kid.”
But the doctor stepped back, took off his coat and his gloves, and followed her out to his office. When they got in there, Rodney stepped up close, not wanting to be left out. Dr. Smidge looked at him; his glare enough to force Rodney to immediately back up. Smidge let her into his office, as she shut the door on Rodney.
Smidge sat down at his desk, with a hard thump. “I wanted to,” he snapped in answer to her earlier question.
“No, you needed to. Why?”
His fingers thrummed on the big pad atop his desk. “The knitting needle.”
“Had you already seen that at the crime scene?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t at first. But, when I was looking for a cause of death, the fact that one breast had been opened up caught my attention. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but I could see the hole.”
“Have you ever seen that before?”
“Once.” He paused. “Years ago.”
At that, she stopped and stared. “What do you mean?”
“I had a case, a long time ago, where another young woman lost her life, with a knitting needle through her heart.”
“I guess it’s not a common murder weapon,” she noted carefully, “but it might have just been what was handy?”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen since then. It’s just nothing that I’m aware of.”
She turned in her seat to look outside, but he was in a tunnel, so no windows were in his office, made even smaller with bookshelves upon bookshelves. “You think they’re related?”
“That young woman’s wrists and ankles were broken too,” he stated.
“You’re kidding. Vocal cords?”
He looked at her for a long moment and then slowly nodded.
She sank back in her chair. “Shit. Okay, … we’re gonna need to know what that case was. Was it ever solved?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’m pretty sure it was.”
“Do you remember any of the details?”
He turned to his computer, clicked on the keyboard for a few minutes, and soon the printer spit out a piece of paper. He got up, walked around, picked it up, and handed it to her.
She looked at it. “Allison Lord.”
“Yes.” Smidge nodded. “Sounds familiar.”
She read the details, which were almost exact. “So a copycat or a long sleep in-between.”
“But, like I said, that doesn’t mean there weren’t others.”
“Right, just no others that came across your desk.”
He nodded. “And, if you think about it, a lot of other desks could have come across this.”
“Back then, would everything have gone into the one database?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Even now we’re not the best at having a central depository.”
“You would think that Canada would have something like that.”
He snorted. “You know how much time and effort that would take?”
“And, if we started today,” she noted, “in twenty years I wouldn’t be looking back and cursing the fact that we didn’t do it earlier.”
He started to laugh at that. “Well, anytime you want to get on that, feel free.”
She groaned. “Nobody will listen to me, and you know it.”
“Nobody ever likes anything that’ll involve a ton of money and that much work.”
“I feel like it’s more of a software thing.” She frowned, as she thought about it. “I’ll have to talk to the sergeant.”
“You do that.” Smidge’s good humor seemed completely restored now. Having dumped everything on her, he stated he would be out for lunch.
She rolled her eyes at him, as she hopped up. As she walked over to the coroner, she asked him, “Anything else about the case bother you, Doc?” He didn’t say anything for a moment, but she pressed on. “Well?”
“I never thought the guy they charged did it.”
“Why not?”
“Her brother was blamed,” he noted quietly, “but there was never a motive.”
“That sounds pretty personal for a brother,” she noted in astonishment.
He looked at her, tilted his head. “The kid was only sixteen.”
“Whoa.” She walked back over to the visitor chair and sat down. “Seriously?”
“He was sixteen when he supposedly committed the crime, and eighteen when he was put away, as I recall.”
“Is he alive still? That is the next question. Because he was a juvenile at the time, so his sentence couldn’t have been all that long. So, in theory, he could be out again.”
“That’s up to you to find out,” Smidge replied.
“Yeah, I’ll work on that.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine doing that to a sister.”
“Or anyone else for that matter. But, if I’d spent years in prison, thinking about it, it might be the first thing I’d do when I got back out again.”
She winced, and, with that thought in mind, she added, “I’ll leave you to your next patient.”
“Other than getting some lunch, I’ll be here all day and probably half the night,” he grumbled.
“Sorry.”
He shook his head. “We have a lot going on right now.”
“It’s not like there’s ever a holiday,” she reminded him.
“There never is.”
With that, she walked out to see Rodney on his phone, texting away, as he leaned up against the wall. He looked up, and she could see the anger still evident in his expression.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
“Sorry about that. I’m not sure why he didn’t want you in there.”
“He doesn’t like me,” Rodney stated.
She stopped, looked at him. “Really no room for like or dislike when it comes to the job.”
“You want to tell him that?”
“Nope, I do not,” she stated. “You’ll have to work things out with Smidge on your own.”
“You’re the only one he seems to get along with.”
“I don’t think so,” she argued. “In this case, he had a reason to shift his schedule around.”
“How do you know he shifted it?”
“Because that was this morning’s body,” she explained. “And he got to it within what? Six hours?”
“Maybe.” He rolled the back of his neck.
“Normally it would be days.”
“Sure, but you seemed to be pretty determined that something was going on.”
She shrugged. “Maybe just instincts.”
He snorted at that. “That’s BS.”
“What? That I have any instincts?” she asked in a mocking tone.
“No, just that you confront him over it.”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Anyway, the reason he moved this one to the front of the line is because he remembered another case like this years ago.” She handed him the printed report. “The brother was charged as a minor. He was eighteen when he was finally put away, sixteen when he committed the crime—supposedly. He proclaimed his innocence. The parents did too, and, of course, he and the sister were said to be close.”
“And Smidge remembered all this why?”
“The cause of death. A knitting needle through the chest wall and on through the heart. Plus both ankles and both wrists broken, and the vocal cords cut.”
“Shit,” Rodney muttered. “God damn it. So a copycat or a repeat?”
“That’s what we’ll have to find out,” she stated.
“Well, the first thing is to find out if he’s still in jail.”
“Given that he was a minor at the time, chances are he’s free by now.”
“But why would you do it all over again, especially if it was your sister—”
“Well, I guess the next thing is, does this woman look like his sister? Did he spend all those years waiting to kill her all over again?”
*
Wednesday, Early Morning Hours
It had been days since Simon had had the nightmare of the screaming woman that Kate then found dead hours later. Kate had been immersed in that case for the last three days, while Simon kept busy, terribly busy, working himself to the bone. That way, when he did finally collapse, the nightmares would either be too distant or his mind too exhausted to even dream them up. It worked for the first night or three, but last night it seemed to work in reverse.
This Wednesday, he woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming out loud, his body covered in sweat. Excruciating pain tortured every inch of his body. He dragged himself to the shower, where he quickly rinsed off the sweat, before coming back and pulling the sweat-soaked sheets off his bed, replacing them with clean ones.
But when he woke up at four in exactly the same state, he just laid here, letting the sweat cool on his body, his expression grim, as he gazed around his room. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that he could see or hear that would do anything to help this woman. And it was a woman; he knew that. It was another case for Kate; he knew that too.
For all he knew, it was old information, the torture of the same woman. Simon didn’t know. Regardless, somebody was in extreme agony, screaming and screaming, but only in his head, although his vocal cords were doing the screaming. He thought maybe she was screaming too, but he had no way to know that. His nightmare was just darkness, incessant darkness. He could almost hear her whimper in the back of his mind, as he lay here.
By the time six rolled around, he got up, had another long hot shower, and put on the strongest coffee he thought he could tolerate. Sitting at his dining room table and staring out at the beautiful horizon outside, he wondered how such a beautiful city could house so much horror. He hadn’t seen Kate since she had caught this latest case. And that was life with Kate.
She showed up whenever and disappeared for days at a time. He could text her, and, if she had time, she’d answer him. However, if she didn’t have time, he always stepped back into the background of her world. He had plenty to deal with on his own, so, in a way, it worked, Yet, in another way, it irked him completely because he wanted more. He needed more. And she wasn’t having any of it.
He sat here, a notepad in front of him, as he worked out all the things he had to do today. Part of it was ordering supplies and going to the bank to move money. Some of it he couldn’t do online, though he preferred to do all of it that way if he had the option. But, every once in a while, actually showing up with a physical presence at the bank was mandatory. It sucked, but that’s what it was. He looked down at the notepad to see that he’d been drawing circles, some weird circles.
After a more careful survey, he realized that they were ropes knotted, with a wrist through it. Even as he watched, his hand continued to draw what looked like one single arm tied down flat. He immediately ripped off the page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it across the floor.
“No fucking way,” he muttered. “It’s bad enough to have all this crap penetrate my nightmares. It’s another thing to have it get in the way of my working world.”
He admitted a lot of the background emotion from his nightmares centered on fear, seeping into Simon too. He’d spent a long time not being a victim. A long time standing up straight and daring anybody to look down on him for whatever reason. He was well respected within his industry. He earned millions on a yearly basis, and, by now, it was actually every quarter. The money flowed quite nicely, as he worked to fix up the lower-end areas of the city.
He’d been asked by several people why he chose these buildings, and he couldn’t say anything, except that they had heart and that the rest of the world had forgotten about them. It was foolish and even a bad business deal at times, since he was a philosopher, looking to reclaim lost souls and buildings. It was just BS, the whole lot of it. And yet, every time another one came up for sale, he found himself completely unable to do anything but buy it and then immediately turn around to fix it up again.
Speaking of which, he had an ongoing tag problem with a certain realtor. She had a property he wanted, and she knew it. But she was asking way too much money for it, so they were stuck at an impasse.
Periodically, once a week or so, she would reach out, asking if he’d thought more about that property. So far, he’d been ignoring her, but, yeah, he was considering it still. It was on his list to take another walk by it, just to see if he felt the same about the place. It was one of four that he had thought about getting. If he could get all four, he could just drop them and put up something nice. Something to help rejuvenate that part of town. But what she wanted for that one property was what he should pay for two, and agreeing to her price would set a dangerous precedent for the others on the block.
And, although money flowed through his fingers with regularity, he didn’t get there by being a fool. So, when it came to actual money landing in his pockets, he knew that the more he had there, the more he could do. Only people, like this realtor, were intent on trying to take out every penny they could. He knew this was business, an industry on its own, but he now had less respect for these types who were greedier in this area than in most industries.
It was tough enough to deal with the various building trades. They promised they’d show up on a Monday, and, when they finally appeared on Wednesday, looking completely innocent, they would look you square in the face and say that you’re the one who made the mistake. It was enough to make you want to rip out their hearts and toss them off the damn building. But Simon had been in this business for way too long and had a short list of contractors he would work with, and a secondary list of contractors he would consider trying again, providing they actually showed up as promised.
The problem was, he had so many buildings in progress right now—whether rehabs or tear-downs—that it was hard to find enough good workers. At that, he checked his phone and found a couple texts sitting there from his contractors, waiting to be read. He perused them, noting nothing was major. One was just an update, and the other one promised completion of a new section today. Simon wouldn’t even say that he’d be there at the end of the day because, at this point in time, he wasn’t sure he was going anywhere.
Then he looked down at the scratchpad. Once again, he’d drawn a woman’s wrist, tied to a table. He felt the fear jolt into his heart. “I don’t need this,” he said in a very low and threatening voice. He almost heard his grandmother’s voice in the background, saying, Tough shit. Deal with it.
He got up, with a hard shake of his head, then ripped off the second piece of paper, scrunched it up, and threw it across the living room. That wasn’t enough, so he grabbed both pieces of paper, stormed out to the recycling and garbage chute, and dumped them in. At least then they’d be gone, maybe not forever, but gone for the moment. He came in and sat back down, but, yet again, his hand immediately picked up the pencil and started sketching the same image. He looked at it and glared.
“What is it you’re trying to tell me?”
And, at that moment, almost like he’d opened a damn door, a scream ripped through his mind.