21 Weeks: Week 2

21 Weeks

  WEEK 2

  …

  R.A. LaShea

  21 Weeks: Week 2

  Copyright 2015 R.A. LaShea

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form, without written permission of the author. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights and buying an authorized edition of this e-book.

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  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Week 3 Teaser

  1 - Beck’s Apartment - Tuesday, 3:52 a.m.

  Door cracking open in the next room, Beck was awake and alert in an instant. Sitting up, the sheet fell from her chest as she looked to the open bedroom door and reached for the t-shirt on the extra pillow to pull over her head. Front door eking closed again, it was obvious the intruder was making a piss-poor effort not to be heard, and, gun from the bedside table in hand, Beck slipped from beneath the thin covers, making a much quieter approach of the bedroom door than the intruder had made his entrance.

  Around the doorjamb, she saw the shadow across her living room - a good six inches taller than and twice as thick as her - and trained her gun with a steady hand as she hit the light switch with her other.

  “Leo!” Arm dropping by her side, Beck watched light brown eyes blink at the sudden onslaught as Leo continued to kick his shoes off by the door as if nothing happened. “I could have killed you.”

  “Doubt it.” Leo was far too calm about the fact he’d just been standing on the other end of her Sig. “You’re always sure before you shoot.”

  “Not always.” Heart still pounding, it was more at the fact Beck had nearly put a bullet in her brother than that he could have been anyone else. “Why didn’t you knock?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Great job with that. Lock the door.” Sliding her weapon onto the table by the wall, Beck went around the counter that separated the open kitchen from the main living area. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m coming off a job close by,” Leo responded. “I thought it would be easier to just sleep here.”

  “You live three miles from here.” Twisting the cap off a bottle of water she’d pulled from the fridge, Beck leaned against the counter, gaze following Leo’s as it looked everywhere but at her as he dropped onto the sofa. “It’s the middle of the night.” She knew all of her brother’s tells. Not meeting her eyes was the biggest one. “I have to be at work in five hours. Now, what are you doing here?”

  Bangs falling too long across his forehead as he glanced back, Beck’s next question was dying to be when he was planning on getting a haircut.

  “Shell kicked me out,” Leo said.

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “What makes you think I did something?”

  “Well, I’m assuming she didn’t throw you out on a whim.”

  Even knowing there had to be a very good reason for Shelly to have told Leo to hit the bricks and for him to show up at her door, when Leo’s gaze darkened, Beck felt the pit drop soundly into her stomach.

  “I hit her,” he said. Expecting it, somehow, and never expecting it, Beck could do nothing but stare at him. “She went with me to Baumbach’s to watch the game. This guy I know kept asking her to run away with him and stuff.” Leo apparently thought it could be explained. “Shell told him to stop, but she was nice about it. It seemed like she was flirting. I just had too much to drink.”

  “That’s your excuse?” Beck uttered. “Shelly was nice to your friend, and you had too much to drink?”

  “I don’t have an excuse.” Looking back again, Leo couldn’t look at her long. “She’s going to leave me.”

  “Well, maybe she should.” Beck didn’t mean to say it, but, words in the wind, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t mean them either.

  When Leo bent forward, elbows on his knees, to drop his head into his hands, Beck took a breath. He told her what happened. Presumably, that meant he wasn’t faking the remorse that set his shoulders so tight it looked as if he might snap at the spine. Setting the bottle on the counter, she walked to the sofa. Sinking into the space next to him, there was a part of Beck that balked at the very idea of bringing Leo any comfort, a part that felt as if beside her brother was the last place she wanted to be.

  “Have you ever hit her before?”

  Then, there was the other part, the part of Beck that felt responsible for Leo since the day their mom decided she couldn’t endure their reality anymore, but hadn’t bothered to rescue them from it when she took off.

  “No.” Leo was adamant.

  “Then, she’ll forgive you.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah.” Beck was pretty sure. That didn’t necessarily mean she thought Shelly should. But she knew her, knew them, and there was no way Shelly would give up on her brother that quickly. “But this is never going to happen again, right?”

  “No,” Leo swore.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” Lifting his head, Leo was wholly sincere, and equally desperate, before he decided it was too much effort and let it drop again. “I don’t expect you to be on my side in this.”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side,” Beck said. “I’m on the side of no one having to be afraid in their own home.”

  Leo’s eyes tearing when he looked up at her again, Beck really couldn’t handle that at the moment. Her loyalty only stretched so far. Leo knew what they were up against. They had been cursed with the worst traits of both their parents - a penchant for violence and a desire to run. There were ways of suppressing them. There were certain choices they simply couldn’t make, and Leo made them anyway. As if he was stronger than nature. Sorry as he might feel for himself, he was hardly the victim here.

  “I’ll get you a pillow.” Beck grabbed her gun off the side table as she moved for the bedroom.

  “Beck?” Leo stopped her at the door, and, no real desire to, Beck forced herself to look back. “Do you think I’m like Dad?”

  Something else she wasn’t prepared to deal with at the moment, Beck shook her head.

  “I really hope not,” she said as she went through the door.

  2 - Mt. Charleston Cabin - Tuesday, 6:58 a.m.

  Smell of blood assaulting her senses as she walked into the wood cabin, Beck wasn’t surprised to find the victim drenched in it. Half-scalped, the skin on the woman’s head lay folded back, blood pouring down her forehead and temples, more pooling on the floor beneath her hands where they dangled at the sides of the chair, fingers chopped off.

  “Nash. Williams.” Apparently, the stern utterance of their names was Bishop’s idea of greeting.

  “Bishop,” Beck responded in kind. “This our vic?”

  “Could be. Maybe not,” Bishop said. “She was shot point-blank in the temple. Everything else you see, M.E. says came prior to the kill shot.”

  Glancing over at Bishop’s sideways nod, Beck spotted the M.E., a guy in his mid-twenties who definitely wasn’t Baxton, talking to some members of the Crime Scene Unit.

  “What you don’t see is her eyes were also gouged out, and her tongue is missing.”

  “Sounds like mob to me,” Beck said. “I suspect someone will be getting a package of parts any day now.”

  “Possible,” Bishop returned. “Or maybe it is our guy, and it’s just been made to look like a mob hit.”

/>   “Has the killer ever done anything like that before?”

  “No,” Bishop admitted. “But, like I said, his m.o. does change.”

  “To the mob’s?”

  “Look, Nash.” Gaze rising from the decimated body, Bishop trained all his attention on Beck. “I know it’s early, and you would rather be sleeping right now. I’d like to be kicking back with a danish and the paper. But this is the nature of the beast. Welcome to Homicide.”

  “So, since we have no idea what we’re looking for exactly, we’re just going to investigate every murder?” Beck surmised.

  “Every one that looks like torture.” Bishop glanced to where the CSU techs gathered evidence across the room. “When we get over there, keep the questions general. As far as they know, this is a standard-issue murder.”

  “How are they supposed to investigate if they don’t know what they’re investigating?” Beck asked.

  “They’re investigating a dead body, just like they always do. If something pops and says serial killer, we’ll worry about that then.”

  “You really think keeping this a secret is the best way to find this guy?”

  “I think it’s how we’re going about it,” Bishop responded. “My way worked before.”

  “Obviously, it didn’t, since you never caught him.” Cursing her loose lips the instant the words tumbled out of them, Beck realized she was too tired, and too cranky, and really should have tried to sleep in the car as Williams drove them the half-hour to the crime scene. “If you’re going to punch me again, could you warn me first? I got woken up in the middle of the night, and called into work three hours early. My reflexes are lagging.”

  “Just work the case,” Bishop uttered, before walking off, which was about the most lenient thing he could do.

  3 - Metro Homicide - Wednesday, 3:00 p.m.

  The mob no longer ruled in Vegas. That was the official stance of the Metropolitan Police Department. Up North, Beck had been to many a mafia crime scene, with Vice and with SWAT, and Bishop had to have seen his share of them too. He was, after all, on the force during the gangster heyday, when every casino had a kingpin in the back and an enforcer on the floor.

  Working the case might lead them to the hitman who did the woman in the cabin, but it wasn’t going to lead them to a serial killer. Every connection Beck and Williams made thus far took them right back to her initial impression, and there wasn’t a shred of evidence pointing any other direction.

  By late afternoon, Beck had no idea what they would be investigating by the week’s end, but she did know which murder they wouldn’t. Wandering the corridors of headquarters, she emerged into sunlight, not entirely sure where curiosity was carrying her until she’d walked the half mile of sidewalks and parking lots to the Clark County Coroner’s Office.

  “Hey.” Baxton looked up as Beck tapped her office door. “You look almost healed.”

  “Almost,” Beck uttered.

  “So, what’s up?”

  “I was hoping you would let me take a look at our vic’s body.”

  “That was Elgin’s case?” Baxton glanced to the computer screen as she typed something on the keyboard.

  “Yeah. But you can show me, right?”

  “Yeah. Of course. Come on.”

  Pulling the band off her wrist, Baxton twisted her unruly hair into submission as she got up, moving past Beck through the door and into the lab. Stopping at the refrigerator, she opened one door and slid the tray from inside, lowering the sheet to reveal the woman’s face, which, even cleaned up, didn’t look much better than it had at the cabin.

  “Did you look at Elgin’s notes?” Beck glanced across the body to Baxton.

  “Yeah. I like to look at every case file that comes in.”

  Fact not surprising her in the least, Beck was actually sort of counting on it.

  “So, based entirely on the evidence, who do you think did this?”

  “It’s a mob hit,” Baxton said.

  “You sound pretty certain.”

  “They’re pretty easy to spot.”

  “The people in charge say the mob isn’t in Vegas anymore,” Beck declared, and Baxton’s throaty laugh cut through the cold air that poured from the open vault to surround them.

  “The people in charge say a lot of things.”

  Even more convinced the case they were investigating wasn’t the case they needed to be investigating, Beck could understand why Bishop was grasping at straws. More than halfway through the week - a week wrought with the tension of knowing a very bad man was coming their way, but not knowing when or where - they still had no body. No victim. No clues to piece together. No one to chase. It was like staring down a growling wildcat in a crevice just out of reach. They knew it was going to attack at any time, but there was nothing they could do until it made its move.

  “Who else do you have down here?” Turning her eyes to the other silver doors, Beck backed out of the way as Baxton returned the mob woman’s body to the cooler.

  “Old lady choked to death in her nursing home.” Baxton placed her hand on the door of one compartment.

  “Sorry I asked.”

  “This man was in maintenance. Electrocuted on the job. And this one’s an OD.”

  “Anything weird about either of those?”

  “Both,” Baxton said. “The man who was electrocuted had been working on the same circuit all week. The power had been off all week. Until today. They figure, he forgot to check it.”

  “And the OD?” Beck asked.

  “Just this.” Moving to the bins that lined the back counter, Baxton plucked a plastic bag from one and held it up.

  “Is that a recovery medallion?”

  “Custom-made,” Baxton said. “This side says ‘Serenity isn’t freedom from the storm. It’s the peace within it.’”

  “And the other?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “That’s a long time to go without using, only for the guy to OD.” Stepping over, Beck took the evidence bag out of Baxton’s hand.

  “It’s sad, but it happens,” Baxton responded. “Though, I do somewhat agree. He was wearing it when he died.”

  “Seems odd, doesn’t it?” Beck asked. “I think, if I were about to use after twenty years of sobriety, I would at least take it off, hide it in a drawer or something.”

  “That’s for you to think about.” Baxton refused to hypothesize beyond her area of expertise. “As far as the evidence goes, it looks like an OD. His prints were the only ones on the syringe. There were no signs anyone else was in the apartment. There’s no bruising, aside from the injection point.”

  “Could I look at their files? OD Guy’s and Electrocution Guy’s?”

  Breathing a small laugh at her non-choice phrasing, Baxton nodded Beck back into her office. “Yeah. Come on.”

  Scanning the files over Baxton’s shoulder when Baxton pulled them up on the computer, there was nothing of particular note about either of them, but, nowhere else to start, Beck wrote the names down anyway.

  “You don’t like the case you’re on?” Baxton asked her.

  Starting to respond, Beck remembered Bishop’s earlier declaration that, as far as anyone else knew, they were looking for an everyday homicide.

  “Something like that.” She hated having to circumvent the truth. Especially with the people who could help them most. “I’m just curious as to what makes one death homicide, and another suspicious.” That part wasn’t a lie. The distinction between the two always had seemed a strangely thin line.

  “It’s never simple,” Baxton said. “An old lady choking on food in a home filled with registered nurses? At the very least, someone made a fatal mistake. Whether it’s an accident or homicide usually comes down to whether or not it can be proven in court.”

  “Yeah,” Beck uttered. In her experience, that was exactly how far the arms of the law could reach. “Could I hold onto this?”

  “It’s evidence.” Baxton shrugged at the silver medallion. “I th
ink it should stay with the body to make sure it goes with him when he leaves, but, for the time being, CSU disagrees.”

  “Well, I’d like to hang onto it for now, but I promise to make sure it gets back to…” Beck glanced to her notes. “Anthony Figueroa, one way or another.”

  “Thanks.” Soft smile curving Baxton’s lips, Beck held the medallion up as she headed back to the office with something to pursue.

  “No. Thank you.”

  4 - Metro Homicide - Wednesday, 3:45 p.m.

  “Where have you been?” Looking up as Beck curved around the edge of her desk, Williams appeared rather put out by her absence. “Martinez was looking for you.”

  “For what?” Beck asked.

  “I think he just wanted to know where you were.”

  “Did you tell him you can’t keep a true agitator down?”

  “No,” Williams returned. “No, I did not tell him that.”

  “Electrocution Guy or OD Guy?” Given that Martinez no longer seemed to be looking, Beck chose not to worry about it.

  “For what? My superhero identity? Electrocution Guy. Definitely Electrocution Guy,” Williams responded.

  “Gary Platt. Maintenance man at Fairways Construction Group. Will you see what you can find out about him?”

  “Why? Who is he?”

  “One of the bodies over at the coroner’s office.”

  “Did Bishop ask you to do this?” Williams asked as Beck took her seat.

  Tossing him a small smile of nonresponse, Beck practically felt his sigh reverberate across their desktops.

  “Do you really want to start this with him already?”

  “If there is a serial killer on the way here, I don’t want to waste time,” Beck returned. “The vic we’re looking at was a mob hit. You know it. I know it. It’s Wednesday afternoon, and we have no body. Now, it’s possible the killer who must not be named is waiting until the last minute to make his play. It’s also possible, he has already made it. Bishop said himself, we have no idea what he’s going to do.”

  “You know the kind of stuff this guy does, though,” Williams said.

  What could be fairly labeled one of the worst Mondays ever spent looking through the killer’s old cases, getting an overview of his greatest hits, Beck did know what the man did. And that everything he did fell in that regrettably overlapping area between disturbing and gross.

  “It could easily look like a mob hit.”

  “Like a mob hit,” Beck responded. “Not a mob hit. Not once, in any of those murders, did this killer put a vic out of his or her misery with a bullet to the brain.”

  “I’m tempted to concede that point,” Williams declared as if he wished he wasn't.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” Beck said. She did realize, though, what she was asking Williams to do. This was her thing, not his. Her way. Williams wanted to be in charge one day. He wasn’t the kind of guy who did, and asked permission later. At any rate, Beck had zero authority to be handing out orders. “If you don’t want to do it, it’s fine. I can look into Platt as soon as I’m done with Figueroa.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Williams responded.

  “Thank you,” Beck stated sincerely. “And if we don’t find anything, Bishop never has to know.”

  “Music to my ears.”

  When Williams looked to his computer screen, Beck slid over in front of her own. Entering the OD vic’s name, she watched the basic rundown and assessment of the case populate, just as it had in Baxton’s office.

  Hesitating for a moment over the tab that would take her to CSU’s photos, she finally clicked, clicking again on the photo of Anthony Figueroa as he was found in his apartment. Sitting against the wall in his kitchen. Rubber strap so tight around his bicep, his arm below was unnaturally pale. Syringe hanging from his inner elbow where the needle still embedded in his skin.

  Silver circle on a thin leather rope around his neck, it lay against Figueroa’s chest - right over his heart - and Beck plucked the real-life medallion off her desk, turning it over in the plastic bag and staring at the “20 Years” imprinted on the back.

  “Metro Homicide.” Phone ringing nearby, Beck reached for it absently. “This is Detective Nash.”

  “Whoa. That sounded way professional.”

  “Leo?” Realizing she had answered her cell, and not her desk phone, Beck dragged her eyes from the screen. “What do you need? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m…” When he hesitated, Beck knew there was a lie coming before he spoke again. A minor one. She could always hear Leo swallow before he was about to drop a big one on her. “You’re almost out of toothpaste. Did you want me to run out for some?”

  Staring blankly at her keyboard, Beck shook her head when she realized that was the lie he actually wanted to tell. “I can pick some up on the way home. It’s fine.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Leo said.

  “Leo, what is it?” Beck pressed him. “I’m a little busy.”

  “I was just wondering… if you get a chance… could you talk to Shell? It’s been two days. Could you maybe just call and see if she’s okay?”

  Head tipping back on a sigh, Beck stared at the light fixture that had gone out over Williams’ desk. What she really wanted was to just stay out of it. Shelly was Leo’s girlfriend. Not hers. Though, she knew she was kind of in it the second Leo showed up at her door.

  “Why can’t you call her?”

  “I just really don’t think she wants to hear from me right now.”

  “She probably doesn’t want to hear from me either,” Beck reasoned. Which was fair, as far as she was concerned. If the problem was in the blood, theirs both flowed from the same polluted source. “If I get a chance, I’ll call her later.”

  “Thanks.” Leo’s relief was somewhat irritating, given that the problem hadn’t been resolved. It had just been transferred to her.

  “Do you need anything else?” Beck asked.

  “No, that’s it.”

  “All right. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

  Glancing over the computer screen as she dropped the phone back to her desk, Beck caught Williams’ gaze upon her, eyes slightly wide as if in expectation she might reveal some element of her life outside of work.

  “The landlord found this guy.” Beck returned to the data on the screen. “They were in the middle of a rent dispute.”

  “Well, there you go.” It took Williams a second to adjust to the conversation at hand. “About to get kicked out of his place. Maybe it was enough to push him over the edge.”

  “After twenty years clean?”

  “Different people have different tolerances for life. Addicts aren’t exactly known for their abilities to cope.”

  A truth she couldn’t deny, Beck glanced to the bottom corner of the computer screen. Only an hour left before quitting time.

  “I need to go talk to someone.” Her twitchy curiosity wouldn’t let her wait it out.

  “About the case?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Where are we going?” Up in an instant, Williams grabbed his jacket, and it was just one more sign he would stick out like a sunflower in a field of weeds where she was headed.

  “It’s a friend,” Beck said. “I can do it alone.”

  “Is that what you want? To do it alone?”

  Realizing that was neither preferable, nor prudent, Beck also recognized she was going to have to find a way to meld her two worlds eventually. Of course, that would be a lot easier if one of them wasn’t so damn suave. “Do you have any other clothes here?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” Williams said.

  “Anything that’s not a suit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You change into something that doesn’t scream cop or IRS man, and you are welcome to come with me.”

  “Oh, am I?” Williams returned. “Thank you for your generous offer.”

  Realizing she had, in fact, sounded like a real twat, Beck sighed. “Listen, I know I can be difficult to…�
� Pretty much everything, Beck had to admit to herself. “Just change, and you’ll see.”

  “Are you going to tell him we’re going?” Williams glanced to Martinez’s door.

  “Yeah.” Beck knew she had to tell Martinez something. Looking toward the desk where Bishop had been off and on all day, she realized he was at least M.I.A. at the moment, which spared her that much pain.

  5 - North Las Vegas Streets - Wednesday, 5:00 p.m.

  Headed north on Martin Luther King, Beck’s souped-up 240SX carried Williams and her out of downtown, past the subdivisions where safety was found in numbers, and right on Owens and Main. Coming to a stop on the corner that practically every homeless person north of U.S. 95 found their way to at some point, a dozen people were spread out along the sidewalks on both sides of the street as Beck climbed out of the car, popping her seat forward to retrieve the donation she stopped to pick up on the way.

  “Water?” She held a bottle out, and, familiar with the system, the people on the street gathered around, thanking Beck with nods. “Any of you know Lionel?”

  “Never heard of him.” A tall guy with what was almost certainly gangrene trailing down his ear popped the cap off his bottle and drank half down in a single gulp.

  “No?” Beck returned as Williams stepped up beside her. “Almost forty. Looks fifty. Has a really good-looking ‘fro most the time. Likes to snap.”

  “That guy?” A second man thrust through the others to get to the front. “That guy took a coupon book off me.”

  “Oh yeah? When’d he do that?”

  “A couple days ago.”

  Though it was hardly in character, the accuser seemed pretty convinced, and equally affronted, and it wasn’t an issue Beck felt a particular need to press.

  “Where?”

  “What, are you a cop?”

  “Yeah,” Beck uttered. “I’m a cop.”

  “I got nothing to say.” The man fell back a step.

  “How much was that coupon book worth?”

  “Ten.”

  Fingers sliding into her back pocket, Beck pulled out one of the bills she placed there for just this occasion.

  “You know, now that I think about it, it might have been twenty.”

  Williams huffing a laugh, Beck glanced his way as she pulled another ten from her pocket and held both before the man of the missing coupon book. “Twenty dollars,” she said. “Now, where did you see him? Where?” She had to snatch the bills back when the guy tried to take them without answering her first.

  “Cesar’s Palace.”

  Worst thing she could hear, Beck was, at least, prepared for it.

  “You know where it is?” the coupon guy asked her.

  “Yeah. I know where it is.” Holding the money out, Beck clung to its tips when the man tried to take it from her hand. “Just know, if I don’t find him, I will find you.”

  “You’re a nasty bitch, ain’tcha?”

  “You want to watch your mouth?” Williams taking a surprise step forward, Beck had yet to see anything resembling the fury that tightened his face.

  “Hey, Williams. Wow, chivalry is not dead.”

  Her hands on his chest putting forth real effort to hold Williams back, the man of the missing coupon book thought better of standing around for another minute. Cutting through the others, he ran to his bedroll halfway down the block, turning to give them an Italian arm salute as he reached it.

  “You don’t believe him, do you?” Williams asked as they moved back toward the car a few seconds later.

  “Unfortunately, it makes sense,” Beck said.

  “It makes sense this friend of yours is kickin’ up at Caesar’s Palace?”

  “Wrong Caesar.”

  6 - Cesar’s Palace (The Other Cesar) - Wednesday, 5:30 p.m.

  “Cee-zer,” Beck greeted the stocky Spanish man who came to the door with perfectly slicked hair and an expression on his face like he’d just swallowed a razor blade.

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.

  “Relax,” Beck returned. “Haven’t you heard? I’m not in Vice anymore.”

  “Well, hell then, Hot Stuff, come on in.” Razor blade dislodged, Cesar swung the door wide. “And who’s this handsome devil?”

  “This is Williams, my new partner. Williams, Cesar Montoya, the worst drug dealer in all of Vegas.”

  “Hey now. That’s uncalled for,” Cesar said. “I ain’t that bad. Nash is just, I don’t know, dedicated or some shit. So, whatcha doin’ now?”

  Thousands of dollars in cash and drugs taken off his hands on repeat occasions, Cesar didn’t seem to harbor any hard feelings as he threw an arm around Beck’s shoulders. Or, perhaps, it was just the fact that the half of Cesar that wasn’t a terrible drug dealer was a terrible lothario, content to try his luck with either women or men, and equally repulsive to both.

  “Homicide.” Grasping Cesar’s hand where it rested on her shoulder, Beck respectfully removed it.

  “Oh, hey, now.” Cesar turned jumpy again in an instant. “I definitely didn’t kill nobody.”

  “No one thinks you did,” Beck said. “Damn. You need to cut down on the cocaine, and up your marijuana intake.”

  “Well, if you ain’t here to bust me, what do you want?” Cesar asked.

  “I’m looking for Lionel.”

  The fact put Cesar no more at ease.

  “He ain’t been here.” Eyes skittering away, he proved himself as inept at lying as he was at everything else. “You told me not to sell to him no more, and I ain’t sold nothin’ to him.”

  “Cesar.” Hand curling around the back of his neck, Beck’s thumb rubbed against greasy skin as she stepped in close. “I know you have. But it’s not my problem anymore. Not officially, at least.”

  Recognizing he was walking a very thin line with her, Cesar inhaled a shaky breath, and it reeked of cheap booze and a last-minute mint as he released it.

  “I just need to know if Lionel is here.”

  “He isn’t.” Cesar shook his head. “He took off yesterday.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No. But it’s not like he’s going to get far.”

  “Did he leave with anything? Cesar?” Beck’s hand gave his neck a warning squeeze.

  “Ten dime bags,” he said. “I told him he could keep forty percent, or add it to his account. You’re going to shoot me, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t shot you yet,” Beck uttered. Though, at times, it really felt like an oversight on her part. “It will help your case a lot if you give me some idea where Lionel might have gone.”

  “He’s been spending some time in a squat off C Street, looking to, you know, find something permanent. That’s all I know,” Cesar said.

  Something permanent. In a squat house off C Street. Which could be sold out from under him, or Lionel could be tossed out of, at any given time. Though, Beck guessed it was better than his “permanent home” for the past seven years, when he lived in the drainage tunnels that ran beneath the city with a large portion of the city’s homeless. No idea when he’d come topside again, Beck assumed he’d gotten tired of having his life uprooted with every hard rain.

  “It’s enough.” She headed for the door.

  “Hey,” Cesar asked as she reached it. “We cool?”

  “Like I said, Cesar. You’re not my problem anymore.”

  Walking out the door and down the cracked walkway, Beck pulled open the chain link gate, glancing to Williams as he looked repeatedly over his shoulder. Though, there was no threat. Cesar did a lot of truly idiotic things, but he could never handle the prison sentence that would come with shooting a cop in the back.

  “So…” Williams breathed easier once they were in the car. “Cesar’s a drug dealer. Your friend is a drug dealer.”

  “Lionel isn’t a drug dealer.”

  “He sells drugs, right?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  Beck was glad Williams didn’t feel the need to remind h
er of the definition of the term. They each had their own interpretations of who Lionel was, based on two different sets of facts. It wasn’t a discussion they needed to have until Williams had them all.

  “We’re going to a squat house next?” he asked.

  “I told you you could stay at the station,” Beck snapped, and Williams threw his hands into the air.

  “I’m just asking.”

  Beck knew she was being overly sensitive, which, for Williams, must have seemed like a state she didn’t know how to possess.

  “Yes, we are going to the squat house,” she answered. “And Lionel is my friend, okay? So, when we find him, don’t treat him like a criminal.”

  “I won’t,” Williams promised.

  7 - C Street Squat House - Wednesday, 6:00 p.m.

  The place was decrepit. Most likely condemned. Property gated all around, it was probably the only way the people living inside were getting away with staying in the house in a neighborhood that still got plenty of traffic.

  “You ready?” Beck was the one who needed to be asked.

  “Yeah.” Pulling the door handle, she climbed from the car.

  On the way up to the gate, it looked well-secured. Thick, steel chain winding through the links, it was just for show, made to look secure so no one would suspect, or check, anything. It took only a small tug for it to come free in Beck’s hand.

  Front door boarded up, she nodded Williams around the side, and they found the back door was the one in use, though currently locked. Kicking it in would work. It would also cause more chaos than would be safe for anyone, potentially dragging out Property Crimes, who would go through and clear the place of its illegal residents while assessing the damage.

  “Could you give me a boost?” Moving to the narrow window that sat high on the wall a few feet down, Beck checked the lower ones on the way, all locked, as expected. It was only the windows no one should be coming through people generally neglected to check.

  “Are you sure it’s clear?” Williams asked with a grunt as his hands basketed beneath Beck’s shoe to give her the height she needed.

  “Yeah. It’s empty.” Beck looked through the pane into the mostly-stripped kitchen. No refrigerator, no oven, it was like a room where food once lived. “Can you give me a little more height?”

  With an upward thrust, Williams put Beck halfway through the window, and Beck prayed her ass would clear it as she shimmied the rest of the way inside, catching herself on the filthy counter next to the filthier sink so she didn’t fall headfirst into the room.

  Landing with a slightly too loud thump, her nose scrunched at the smell of a litter box that hadn’t been changed in weeks, and indicated there was something other than humans inhabiting the space, as she moved back to the door. Hand on her gun, in case any of the inhabitants proved feral, she was sweating by the time she reached it to let Williams inside.

  “Looks like there’s only one way.” Beck indicated the darkened doorway off the front of the kitchen, and even Williams blew out a breath in the stale heat.

  “Lead the way.”

  Light from the sun leaking in around the blinds, it was enough to guide them through the kitchen doorway. Though, once they stepped into the front room, the blankets tacked up over the windows to keep people from seeing in, and the sun out, rendered visibility poor, and Beck whirled as something startled in the shadows.

  “Hey. It’s cool.” She recognized the outline of a man as he sat up in a pile of blankets on the floor. “We don’t want to bother you. I’m just looking for my friend. Lionel. Is he here?”

  Raising a finger, the man indicated upstairs. Or flipped Beck off. In the gray room, it was kind of hard to tell.

  “Thanks.” Beck just had to trust it was the former as she turned to the stairs.

  In the upstairs hallway, she and Williams passed a woman who begged them for something unintelligible, so strung out, she probably thought they were apparitions, before they came to the first bedroom. Toeing open the door, Beck saw the patch of black hair jutting out from beneath a dirty comforter on a bed that had clearly been abandoned along with the house.

  “Lionel?” Sunlight pouring in at the edges of a tattered quilt over the window, it struck Beck like a punch in the chest that it was the best place she had found him in years. “Lionel?”

  Relief flooding her when he lifted his head and blinked her way, Beck stared into dark eyes that were happy to see her for a split second, before they remembered where they both were.

  “Li’l Bee, what are you doin’ here?”

  “What do you think?” Beck said. “I’m looking for you.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here.” Looking away, shame hunched Lionel’s shoulders - it always looked so heavy - and the cuff of his sleeve felt crusty against Beck’s skin as she touched his hand, cold, despite the extreme heat inside the house.

  “Do you need something to eat?”

  Head dropping back to the mattress, it took Lionel a few seconds to want to answer her. “Yeah.”

  “Come on.” Taking his arm, Beck hauled him up, and Lionel’s legs were so wobbly as he made it to his feet, she wondered how long he’d been lying there.

  8 - Cookie’s Barbecue - Wednesday, 6:40 p.m.

  The way he scarfed his food, it was as if Lionel was making up for a month of not eating. Stomach clenching at the thought, Beck dropped her own sandwich into the cardboard tray as she realized it was probably because he was.

  “Have you seen Ramona?” he asked between bites that left particles clinging to his untrimmed beard.

  “No.” Beck shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Lionel shrugged. “Nothing will have changed.”

  Reaching for his soda, he slurped it to the bottom, and Beck pushed her cup across the table in case he needed more.

  “I did see Corey.”

  “Yeah?” Lionel paused in the carnage of his meal.

  “Over Christmas,” Beck said.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s good,” Beck responded. “He has a job in Albuquerque, but he hopes to move back when it’s done.”

  “He should stay away.” Ripping another bite off his sandwich, Lionel’s face tensed as he chewed it.

  Beck understood why he felt that way, as if Corey would be better off anyplace else. She knew what it was like to have ghosts inhabiting the same city in which one lived. Maybe Lionel was right. Maybe it would be better to just leave the past behind. Of course, that meant leaving everything else behind too.

  “So, what do you need, Li’l Bee?” Last of his food gone, Lionel brushed his fingers and raised a napkin to his face as he glanced Williams’ way. “Pretty sure this isn’t a social call.”

  “No.” Beck realized it had been quite a while since she last found him just to see him. A year at least. It wasn’t an excuse - there was no excuse - but it was hard to see him like this. And she knew it was harder for Lionel to be seen. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Well, I’m right here,” Lionel declared, and Beck hated that she had come for any other reason than to see if he was okay.

  “If you got straight again…” Still, she had to know. “If you got through withdrawal, you were in meetings, you were back on track, what would it take for you to start using?”

  “You mean, if I had a decent job and a real roof over my head?”

  “Yeah.” Beck nodded. “If you had your own apartment, a job that paid all the bills, you’d been clean twenty years, what would it take you to relapse?”

  “Twenty years?” Lionel laughed. “Hell, I can’t even see past the end of today. I don’t know. I can’t say I wouldn’t, but I imagine it would take a lot. Then again, maybe I’m not the best person to ask, ‘cause it took a lot in the first place.”

  Reaching across the table, Beck was glad to find Lionel’s hand finally warm where it rested in the evening sun. This was why she had to ask him, she realized, because he wasn’t any drug addict. He didn’t start using bec
ause the stuff was available at a party one night, or because he was looking for an experience. He did it because he couldn’t endure his reality anymore. He needed a way to go on, and heroin worked.

  “But it’s an escape, right?” Tensing at the question, Beck worried Williams was about to say something it would be impossible for her to forgive. “You keep using because it takes away the pain?”

  “Yeah,” Lionel admitted. “That’s why I keep doing it. But an escape? Look around you, Brother. Look at me. Life might be one pain after another, but this ain’t exactly a vacation.”

  Other hand slipping beneath Lionel’s on the table, Beck clung more tightly to him. “Lie, if you were clean - decent place to live, decent enough life, twenty years - and someone came along, offering you one last high, what would that feel like for you?”

  “That would be the worst thing anyone could do.” Lionel didn’t hesitate.

  “Would it be torture?”

  Staring across the table, as if he knew there were depths to the question they weren’t diving into, Lionel gave up on his curiosity with a nod. “Every day I’m a slave to something that doesn’t even make me feel good anymore. I get free, and someone comes around tempting me with chains? Yeah, that’s torture.”

  Glancing to Williams, Beck couldn’t entirely interpret the look on his face as he swung his eyes from her back to Lionel.

  “Why do you call Beck ‘Little Bee’?” he asked, and question actually bringing a smile to Lionel’s face, black holes shown through rotting teeth in a face weathered well beyond its years.

  “‘Cause she’s short now, but she was damn near midget when we were kids. Her legs would move so fast when she was trying to keep up with us, she was like bzzz, bzzz. Just like a little bee. When we got older, we realized how good a name it really was. ‘Cause our Li’l Bee’s got a real sting in her.”

  When Lionel smiled across the table, Beck remembered that time, and how she’d thought it was the hardest any of them would ever have it. It turned out, for some of them, those were the good years and the worst was yet to come.

  9 - Downtown Las Vegas Streets - Wednesday, 8:00 p.m.

  “What is Lionel to you?” Williams asked on their way back to the precinct’s parking garage.

  Lionel insistent they take him back to where they found him, Beck did what he asked, knowing his right to decide where he spent his days and nights was one of the few things he had left.

  “You said he was your friend, but that was more than friendship.”

  Chest tightening as she sucked in a breath, Beck stared at the traffic ahead, considering flipping on the siren and clearing the way. She expected that taking Williams with her would result in questions. She’d just hoped they could wait until tomorrow.

  “Lionel’s younger brother, Corey, was my brother Leo’s best friend,” she said. “Lionel is a few years older than all of us. When we were kids, he took care of us. He protected us in all the ways he could. When he went into the Army, he even sent stuff back for us. Figure that, a soldier sending care packages home.”

  “Sounds like a stand-up guy,” Williams said. “So, what happened?”

  Certain Williams didn’t mean to imply Lionel’s descent onto the streets made him any less of a stand-up guy, Beck still had to shrug to ease the tension that seized her shoulders at the question.

  “He got married not long after he went into the service. He and his wife had a little girl, Jenny. Seven years ago, when Jenny was seven, she was killed by a stray bullet outside her school.”

  “God. That’s horrible.”

  “Ramona left him,” Beck went on. “She blamed Lionel for moving them to a bad neighborhood. I’ve tried to help him. We’ve all tried to help him. I think he stays away, because he thinks he’ll be a burden, and he’s still trying to protect us. There’s nothing we can do until he wants to stay.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me, Leo, our friends,” Beck responded. “Lionel was kind of the neighborhood big brother.”

  “What did he protect you from?”

  Light turning yellow, Beck floored it to make it through Mineral Avenue before it turned red, gazing off toward the salvation of headquarters ahead.

  “You spend much time in Crack Alley?” she asked.

  “Can’t say I do. But I am familiar with it,” Williams responded.

  “I did,” Beck said. “Twenty-two years. Nine more just outside its boundary. If you know about it, you know when I say Lionel protected us, I mean from pretty much everything.”

  “That had to have been a tough job,” Williams uttered.

  “It was. And not one too many teenage boys would have taken it upon themselves to do. Lionel’s a champion,” Beck whispered. “Even if he doesn’t remember.”

  10 - Metro Homicide - Thursday, 8:58 a.m.

  Beck had been there more than two hours. An hour after, Bishop came in, glancing to her in confusion, and asked if there’d been a break in the case.

  “I left early yesterday,” Beck replied, and it was true enough. Bishop hadn’t, after all, asked what she was doing, and Beck wasn’t about to volunteer information.

  Two hours, she had sat at her desk, combing through Anthony Figueroa’s life, looking for a trigger, anything that might have sent the man spiraling down a dark path, that might have compelled him to seek relief from his pain.

  Job secure, according to the H.R. woman who answered the phone at the company where Anthony worked, it was clear, if there was a dispute about rent, it wasn’t because Anthony couldn’t afford to pay it. Assuming, of course, he hadn’t gone back to using in the months before he was found dead in his apartment. That was a pricey habit almost no one could afford while living an ordinary life.

  But there were no signs of that either. According to the H.R. woman, Anthony was an exemplary employee. Never missed work. Rarely made mistakes. Not exactly the behavior of a man who was falling back into old addiction.

  “Morning.”

  It was rather fitting that Beck was thinking about exemplary employees when Williams made it to work right on time. Both in accordance with his schedule, and at the very moment she reached a level of certainty she could no longer keep to herself.

  “I have something to tell you. And you’re not going to like it.”

  “You think OD Guy is our vic,” Williams declared as he landed in his chair.

  Stunned for a moment, Beck smiled as she realized she really hadn’t been all that clandestine with her line of questioning the night before.

  “Now, I don’t want to jinx things,” she said. “But is it possible our minds are starting to sync up?”

  “I think I’m just beginning to understand how yours works,” Williams returned.

  “And?” Beck asked. “Do you agree?”

  “I don’t know.” Williams sighed. “I know we’ve got a letter from a psychopath telling us there’s going to be a body, and we’ve got three on slabs, none of which look like the work of a serial killer.”

  “It’s him, Kevin,” Beck appealed to him. “I know it is. This man, this was his demon. This was his Hell.”

  “There’s no evidence anyone else was even there.” A fair point, it changed very little. “You may be right, but you can’t win a case on a feeling.”

  “This isn’t about winning a case. This killer is going to murder nineteen more people if we can’t stop him. We have to get inside his head.”

  “Is that how you’re going to spin this for Bishop?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell him,” Beck uttered.

  “Oh, hell no.” Tipping back in his chair, Williams seemed to be trying to get as far away from that suggestion as humanly possible. “I’ll have your back, but I’m not the one who’s going to say it.”

  “Really?” Beck asked as he came back down with a thump. “You’ll have my back?”

  “Yeah.” Lips set in a tight line, Williams nodded. “You’re my partner, so, if you’re thinking it, I guess I’m thinking it too.”
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  “You know, Williams, you’re all right.”

  Laughing away his anxiety, Williams seemed to diverge on that point. “Yeah. Thanks.”