Painkiller (4 page)

“Which one?” Reed asked, barely stifling a yawn as he spoke.

“Northern Illinois Technical University,” Maclean said, looking down at the file to read it off. “It’s up Lakeshore drive a little. Medical school, science and tech research—looks like it’s only been around a few years now.”

“Uh huh,” I said, “what was the victim a doctor of?”

“Philosophy for all I care,” Detective Maclean said, holding off exasperation by a thin effort. “Will you just let me finish my bit and then ask?” He gave me a steady gaze until I nodded almost imperceptibly. “All right. Vic is age 45, he’s a professor at NITU, lives in a condo up on the Gold Coast—”

“What’s—” I started to ask, drawing an irritable look from Detective Maclean.

“It’s a neighborhood north of here on the lake, lots of condos and mansions and whatnot, really ritzy,” Reed said, and I turned to look at him. “I used to come down here a lot on assignment when I worked for Alpha.”

“If I may?” Maclean asked. “Dr. Jacobs’s wallet was left on his person, along with a roll of cash in his front pocket in the amount of $4,000—”

“Whoa,” I said, my eyebrows lurching up. “I guess robbery wasn’t the motive.”

“We have no idea where he came from,” Maclean said icily, “and no idea where he was going, other than to State Street.” He flipped the folder closed. “Death, as you may have guessed, was probably the result of traumatic brain injury, either from the initial impact or when his head hit the wall. Either way, no sign of a weapon used. Preliminary forensics says the impact sight on the jaw shows hints of knuckles being the weapon, and so …” He extended the folder toward me. “Looks like it’s one of yours.”

“Thanks,” I said and stepped up to take the folder from him. I opened it and skimmed; he’d done a pretty good job of summarizing what they had so far. “Does the professor have a car registered to him?”

Maclean shrugged. “I can check if you want. Central’s pretty backed up, though, so it might take a while.”

I sighed. “I miss J.J. already.”

“Never thought you’d say that,” Reed chuckled.

J.J. was my own personal tech geek. Well, maybe not my personal one, but he’d worked for our agency and had been instrumental in solving more cases than I could count. I looked around, hoping for an obvious surveillance camera. There wasn’t one. If there had been, J.J. could have cracked it in like two seconds and just given us our murderer on a silver platter. “Any chance you’ve got some uniforms digging up surveillance footage from the area?” I asked Detective Maclean.

“Yeah, they’re canvassing, too,” Maclean said with a frown. “Probably be a few days on that, though.”

“So …” I said, glancing down the file as I reached the end, “robbery’s not the motive, probably—”

“Probably?” Reed looked at me like I was an idiot. “There’s like four grand on the guy, plus his wallet.”

“That doesn’t mean something else wasn’t taken,” I said, staring at the folder, “or that the murderer wasn’t interrupted or scared off before he could do his thieving.”

“Fair point,” Reed said with the air of a man who didn’t quite let go of his skepticism. “But unlikely.”

“Agreed,” I said, closing the folder. “We’ll need to go to his place of work, and his home.” I looked around the alley, trying to reconstruct the event in my head. I wasn’t Sherlock, so it didn’t happen easily. I tried to imagine him flying, hitting the wall, and cast my eyes over the damp asphalt. “He probably got clocked somewhere over there,” I motioned to a few blood spots that had fallen in the alley, and I started over there, careful where I stepped so as not to disturb potential evidence.

“Yeah,” Reed said, following along behind me, matching his steps to mine. “That’s a solid hit. You’re talking a high on the scale meta to hit like that.”

“Scale?” Detective Maclean said, staying right where he was by the corpse.

“There’s a scale of powers,” I answered idly as I threaded over to the place of attack. “Low-grade metas don’t hit much harder than a normal person. High scale, though …” I waved at the body next to him. “Like a car doing ninety. They’re also correspondingly faster, more dexterous, agile …”

“Uh huh,” Maclean said, now with his arms folded in front of him. “When I was a beat cop, probably twenty-five years ago, I saw this guy pick another guy up with one hand and throw him ten feet. You think that was a meta?”

“Probably,” I said, stooping to look at the blood spatter at my feet. I sniffed, catching a whiff of something that was neither a dumpster nor our corpse. I looked up at Reed, whose nose was twitching. “You getting this?”

He frowned, wrinkling his nose as his nostrils flared. “Is that … cigarettes?”

“Yeah,” I said, following my nose to the origin point of the scent, “and rosemary, I think.” The smell lingered faintly behind a dumpster maybe ten feet from the place where Professor Dr. Carlton Jacobs had met his fateful sucker punch.

“Rosemary?” Detective Maclean called to us from where he stood near the mouth of the alley. “From what?”

“Either the perp’s dinner or some sort of herbal remedy, maybe?” I asked, shrugging. “Not sure, it’s pretty faint and masked by the scent of smoked cigarettes.” I looked around but didn’t see any discarded butts. “I don’t think he smoked any here, he’s just trailing the aroma.” I sniffed and caught it lingering under the cold.

“I don’t smell anything,” Maclean said, sniffing. He made a face like he’d gotten a brain freeze headache from huffing the Chicago air.

“You wouldn’t,” I said, taking another whiff. Definitely rosemary. Weird.

“Where should we go first?” Reed asked.

“His college is closed at this hour, I’m assuming.” I stood up, looking back down the alley to catch Maclean’s nod. “To his place, I guess, so we can pore over the details of Professor Jacobs’s life, see if we might be able to find a motive for the killer.” I made my way carefully back to the body. “Because it looks to me like whoever did this … they waited for a while, either for him or someone else.”

“Premeditation,” Maclean said, nodding.

“They didn’t throw a love tap, that’s for sure,” I said, “and if he was the target, and they waited for him … it means they knew he was coming. And hopefully we’ll be able to find some idea of why he was here in this alley in the middle of the night,” I stared down at Professor Jacobs’s blank face, the blood wreathing his head like a crown of red, “and where exactly he was going when he got murdered.”

I stepped out of the cab after about a five-minute ride onto a road overlooking Lake Shore Drive, which I had already realized was probably one of the swankier addresses for Chicago. Lake Michigan was glittering black, lights sparkling along its surface just across the street and over the freeway-like version of Lake Shore Drive that was separated from the residential one I was standing on by a waist-high barrier with fencing. Occasional cars were zooming past over there, while I stood on a much more placid residential drive, in front of a decidedly upscale apartment building.

It was either an old and refurbished brick building, or it was a new building constructed to look old; either way, I could tell a lot of money had gone into it. A cop car was parked out front as Reed and I breezed our way in wordlessly to where a doorman waited behind a desk, talking to a couple of uniformed CPD officers.

I flashed my badge at the guys waiting and Reed followed my lead. “Evening, gents,” I said. “I need to take a look at Professor Jacobs’s apartment.”

“Sure thing,” the doorman behind the desk leapt to his feet. He was a little darker-skinned, bald like he shaved his head, probably just south of forty. “I already got the spare key for the officers here.” He nodded at the cops.

“Breckinridge,” one of them, a fair-haired guy with a flat expression said, reaching out to shake my hand. I took it and he pumped firmly but not obnoxiously. He nodded at his partner. “This is Tanner.” Tanner was not, in fact, tan. He was the whitest dude I’ve ever laid eyes on, and he wore a completely implacable look that would not have been out of place on Andrew Phillips’s face.

“You guys take a look upstairs yet?” Reed asked politely.

Breckinridge seemed eager to please. “Not yet. We just came and delivered the news, rustled up the keys so the detective assigned could do the honors. We’ll bat cleanup once you get done, though, bag any evidence, get stuff sent off to the lab if we get any idea of clues.” He held up his hands, all excited. He already had blue latex gloves on.

“All right, then,” I said and nodded toward the doorman. “You gonna take us up?”

He looked torn for a second. “I’m supposed to watch the door …”

“Not a problem,” I said, quickly snatching the keys out of his hand. “You keep an eye on that door in case a flood of burglars and junkies comes wandering through randomly right at this very moment.” I headed for the elevator. “I can probably find my way up. I’ll just keep knocking on doors at random until I find the right one.”

The doorman shot me a pained expression. “Twelfth floor. Number fifteen.”

“Awww,” I said, feigning disappointment. “It would have so fun to do it my way.” I headed for the elevators, Reed and Breckinridge trailing behind me. I glanced back and saw Tanner hanging by the front desk, watching me go with a healthy dose of suspicion. I brought that out in people.

I waited until the reflective steel elevator doors slid shut on the three of us before I spoke. “Breckinridge, your partner seems like a shithead.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Breckinridge said, shaking his head. “He’s just stiff.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “after four hours, you’re supposed to call the hotline for that problem.”

Breckinridge frowned at me as the elevator carried us up pretty quickly. Understanding dawned over his face and he snapped his fingers as he pointed at me. “Ohhh! Oh! Got it. Good one.”

Reed just stood there shaking his head, face buried in one of his hands. “No. Just … no.”

“What?” I asked.

Reed pulled his hand out of his face to reveal an indulgent smile. “Breckinridge … you want to wait at the door while we scope out the apartment, please?”

“Sure,” Breckinridge said, eager beaver that he was, as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open to reveal a pristine, well-lit white hallway. “I’ll be right outside if you need anything.” He followed us dutifully down the hall until we reached 1215.

I fiddled with the keys until I found the right one. There were a lot of them on the ring, but fortunately they were each labeled, thus preventing me from losing patience and kicking down the door. I unlocked it and listened, hoping my job would be made easy by finding the murderer sleeping in the victim’s bed or something. I stuck my head in the door and waited. No such luck; it sounded quiet in there.

“Okay, in we go,” I said, popping in the front door and flipping the light switch. I found myself in a small entryway, and suddenly wondering if Professor Jacobs was married. If so, this was about to be awkward. This is why I normally left this stuff up to local PD and just made my entrance after they’d done the scut work.

The entry had a coat closet framed with a dark mahogany sliding door. I slid it open and looked to see a few coats hanging within. No women’s coats, though. All the shoes below were men’s, and there were only a half dozen pairs of varying kinds from dress to tennis shoes to snow boots, which probably ruled out a male domestic partner as well. I was also relieved to see no children’s shoes of any kind.

“I think we’re on our own, here,” I said, stepping through the entry into a well-furnished living room area. There was a rug in the middle of the room that was squared to look like tile, each in a subtle different shade of grey moving across the spectrum to beige and brown. It was a little weird, but it kind of worked with the grey-scale sofa and two white leather chairs that stood with their backs to me. A coffee table anchored the middle of the room, cluttered with paperwork and further convincing me that Professor Jacobs lived alone.

I took it all in, sniffing for the smell of cigarette smoke and finding instead some kind of faint vanilla scent mingled with one of the prominent brands of men’s deodorant.

Reed stepped up next to me, still shaking his head.

“What?” I asked him.

“Still stuck on your erection joke back there,” he said, looking at me with faint disappointment. “I haven’t been this embarrassed since I had that party for the last Packer/Viking game, when you asked me which team was which.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, stepping around the wall at the far end of the living room to find myself in a kitchen separated by a long counter from another livingroom-esque space, this one coupled with a glass kitchen table sitting just on the other side of the counter. Beyond the brown leather couch in this room was a view of Lake Michigan on one side and to my right a commanding view back down the lakeshore toward downtown. “I know we’re the Vikings.”

“Uh huh,” Reed said. “What are the team colors?”

I looked out the windows, taking in the view. This place was expensive. “Uh … red and … green?”

“Not even close,” Reed said. “That’s the colors for the North Pole Santas.”

I blinked. “There are no North Pole Santas in the NFL.”

“I bet you don’t know that for a fact,” he said, breaking off from me to go rummage through the kitchen. He pulled on a pair of leather gloves as he did so, opening the drawers and giving each a quick glance before shutting them again.

I found myself drawn to the view. This was a corner apartment with a stunning view of both the lake and the city. “Reed?” I asked, looking at the Hancock tower glinting like a black obelisk in the distance, “what do you figure a place like this runs per month?”

“A lot,” he said, opening drawers and closing them again. “Twenty, thirty grand a month, maybe?”

“Does that strike you as a lot for a college professor?” I asked, turning my back on the view.

“Four grand of cash rolled up in his pocket strikes me as a lot for a college professor,” Reed said, glancing up from his search to look at me. “Twenty or thirty K for rent on a monthly basis seems absurd.”

“We should get his bank records,” I said, wishing I could call J.J. and get them right now. “Something funny’s going on there.”