The Abbey (14 page)

I walked straight ahead at a leisurely pace, being careful to avoid drawing undue attention to myself. The Taurus was on the edge of the front parking lot about a hundred yards to the left of where I stood. There were a dozen or so cars as well as the church’s small, front lawn between us. I considered my surroundings for a moment and then walked straight ahead to the church’s rear. I could hear music inside. Wednesday night services, maybe. The noise masked my footsteps some, and the shadows hid me fairly well.

I pulled out my firearm and chambered a round before edging around the corner of the church and onto its main lot. The Taurus was straight ahead, maybe twenty–five yards away. The driver’s window was cracked open, and he dangled a cigarette through the opening. I pushed off from the building and sprinted forward, my Glock held in front of me. The driver saw me running, but he didn’t have a chance to do much more than flinch. His partner never saw me coming. I smashed the rear driver–side window with the butt of my gun. Glass shattered inward onto the rear seat, sprinkling like rain against a red camping cooler. Both men jumped.

“Hands on the dash now.”

Neither man moved for a moment.

“What the fuck, Rashid?” said the driver, pounding his hands against the steering wheel. “This is my wife’s car.”

The voice was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place where I had heard it.

“Get your hands on the dash or I will end you right now,” I said, pressing my firearm through the now broken window. I held it against the driver’s head. He stiffened.

“Relax, Ash,” said the passenger, stretching his hands in front of him to reach the dashboard. “We’re on the job.”

I recognized that voice. Detective Greg Doran from Special Investigations. I shifted on my feet and licked my lips, breathing hard.

“What are you guys doing following me?”

Doran turned around and faced me.

“Why don’t you put the piece away and we’ll talk like adults?”

I considered for a moment, but then did as he requested and slipped my firearm back in my jacket. Both men got out of the car after that, but the driver seemed more interested in his back window than anything else. Doran leaned against the rear bumper.

“Now that we’re all comfortable,” I said, casting my gaze from one to the other detective. “Why is a detail following me and who authorized it?”

“You’re paying for my window,” said the detective I didn’t know. “I hope you know that.”

I glanced at him.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said. The guy looked as if he were going to bull rush me, but Doran put his hand up, stopping him. I nodded my thanks and then looked from one to the other. “Now can you answer my question? Why are you watching me?”

Doran crossed his arms, his eyes unblinking as he stared back at me.

“Why were you at Nathan Cutting’s house?” he asked.

The question took me back for a second, but I caught myself quickly.

“Visiting a friend,” I said. “Does it matter?”

Doran shrugged slightly.

“You tell me,” he said. “People you visit keep ending up dead. There aren’t that many dots to connect.”

“I was checking something out.”

“You’re on vacation,” said the detective I didn’t know. I looked at him and then back to Doran.

“Who is this douche bag?” I asked.

“Detective Smith,” he said, his face expressionless. “Now answer Detective Doran’s question. What were you doing at the house?”

I snickered and looked down.

“If you guys have any more questions, you can direct them to my union lawyer. You can also tell Lieutenant Bowers that he ought to send better detectives if he wants to follow me next time.”

I smiled at them both and headed back towards my house via the main street. Doran and Smith’s Taurus passed me about a block down. The driver, I imagine it was Smith, gave me the finger; I waved in return. By the time I got back to my house, Hannah and Megan were back. My wife was in the kitchen slicing the chicken I had purchased while Megan was watching a cartoon on the Disney channel.

We ate dinner on the back patio as evening faded to night. Hannah was disappointed when I said I had another errand to run, but she seemed more than a little relieved when I told her detectives would likely be watching the house for the next few days. I figured it didn’t matter if those detectives were investigating me; they’d still protect my family if need be. Hannah and Megan went back inside after dinner, but I stayed on the porch and took out my cell phone. I dialed Olivia’s cell and waited for her to pick up. I left a simple message when she didn’t.

“It’s Ash. I found something at the Cutting’s. Call me back when you can.”

I hung up the phone and sipped on a glass of iced tea left from dinner. Olivia called me back about five minutes later. I heard the swoosh of a freeway in the background, making it difficult to understand her.

“I’ve only got a minute, but what’d you find?”

“A gun. Kid hid it in a safe in his floor,” I said, turning the volume on my phone higher. “He knew someone was after him.”

It sounded as if Olivia said something else, but it was muffled by the rush of traffic.

“Is there any way you can go somewhere a little less noisy?” I asked. I don’t know if Olivia said anything in response, but I heard a car door opening and closing. The freeway noise dissipated. “Where are you?”

“In the parking lot at work,” she said. “You stirred up a lot of shit today.”

“By catching the tail Bowers put on me or making him look like an idiot in front of the Prosecutor?”

Olivia snickered, but there was little merriment in it.

“You need to learn to quit when you’re ahead, Ash,” she said. “Watch your back.”

I nodded even though she wasn’t there to see it.

“You think he’ll keep the surveillance on my house?”

“Yes,” she said. “Only this time, you’re not going to see them.”

That was fine with me. As long as they were watching my house, Hannah and Megan were relatively safe.

“Forget about Bowers for now. Robbie Cutting was murdered, and I’m guessing he knew who did it.”

Olivia paused for a moment, presumably thinking it through.

“Okay, I’ll play along. Suppose he was murdered. Let’s also suppose you find out who did it. What are you going to do?”

I glanced at my house. I could see Hannah through the kitchen window. She glanced up and smiled at me. I returned it as well as I could, unsure how I should answer Olivia.

About six years back, my first partner in homicide and I caught a case involving a security guard at a university downtown. Two girls on campus had gone missing, and we figured the guard was good for it even if we couldn’t pin it on him. If we had waited to nail the case down, the girls were almost guaranteed to be dead before we could find them. My partner and I didn’t like that option, so we broke into the guy’s house while he was at work. Unfortunately, we were right about the guy, but wrong about the timing. The girls were both dead in his basement. Worse than that, since we broke in early, the evidence was fruit of the poisonous tree. We couldn’t use it in court because we found it while conducting an illegal search.

It had been a nasty case, and nobody liked the outcome, especially me. I ended up borrowing a stack of photos from an old sex crimes case and hiding them along with marijuana in the guy’s car. A drug dog sniffed him out at the post office, and he was arrested and convicted for possessing child pornography. Somebody slit his throat in the shower on his second day in prison.

I’ve never questioned if I did something wrong that day with the pictures or with the search. Given the chance, I’d do both again and sleep fine for the rest of my life. The system needs people like me to work. Right, wrong, justice, injustice. The concepts sound good in a sermon or in a speech, but things are more complicated in real life. In real life, you’ve got to get your hands a little dirty, and occasionally you’ve got to stick them in so much shit you’ll wonder if the stink will ever come out. I knew that, and I accepted it. At the same time, there was a big step between planting evidence on a suspect I know is guilty and taking that suspect out myself. I didn’t know if I had a right to do that.

Olivia must have sensed my hesitancy because she asked if I had hung up.

“I’m here,” I said. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’re going to have to figure it out quick, Ash, and I’m not going to help you. You want my advice, though? Get rid of anything you found at the Cutting’s house, quit this investigation of yours, and spend time with your family. Stop stirring up shit before somebody gets seriously hurt.”

“Is that what you’d do?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I guess Olivia wasn’t the person I thought she was.

“I’ll give your advice consideration,” I said. “Take care.”

I hung up after that and leaned back in my chair. Losing Olivia was a loss, but not a big one. I had hoped she’d be able to go with me that night as a small show of force, but I could do it without her. She was a good detective, but we were from different worlds. In hers, everything lined up neatly and precisely according to set, unalterable rules. I didn’t really believe in rules, something that had made our brief partnership difficult.

Since Olivia wasn’t going to help me, I needed to call in some backup. I took out my cell phone and thumbed through its address book.

Indianapolis has a couple million residents, including a number of forensic pathologists in private practice. Some were willing to help out the law–enforcement community when we needed outside testing of a piece of evidence. One of them, Dr. Mack Monroe, happened to be the head of the pathology department at my wife’s hospital. Hopefully he’d still be at work.

He answered on the third ring.

“Mack, this is Ash Rashid from
IMPD
. How are you?”

“Be better if you guys paid my last bill.”

I probably should have expected that from my department. We hired Mack a couple of months earlier when an inmate we convicted appealed his sentence and was granted a retrial due to alleged mistakes in IMPD’s forensics lab. The inmate’s family hired an outside consultant to tear the lab’s procedures apart, but Mack rebutted everything and argued that the case was sound. The jury ruled in the state’s favor, so the inmate was back in jail where he belonged.

“How much do we owe you?” I asked. “I might be able to make some calls and get it pushed through.”

“Forty grand.”

I swore under my breath.

“You worked for five days.”

“Yeah, and in those five days, I gave you boys a notch in the ‘W’ column. Good verdicts don’t come cheap. Now what do you want, Ash?”

I took a breath before speaking. Forty grand was a lot, even for five days of expert testimony. The fee made me suspect there was something else going on, but I didn’t ask.

“I’m working a case. I need a substance tested for cocaine. I wondered if I could hire you for it.”

Mack actually chuckled.

“You guys have some nerve, you know that? I’m not working with the city again until I’m paid.”

“This isn’t for
IMPD
,” I said. “Consider it a private matter.”

Mack paused before speaking, and I heard him draw in a deep breath.

“I like you. We don’t know each other very well, but I like you. And I say this as someone who likes you. Your wife’s not doing blow. I would have heard about it. And besides, you can’t afford me. Frankly, you probably can’t even afford a consult, let alone lab work.”

“This isn’t about Hannah. I’ve got a case with two dead kids, and my department is ignoring it. If we don’t do something, we’ll probably have more to follow. I just need a little help.”

Mack growled into the phone.

“Jeeeesussssss,” he said, drawing out the two syllables. I heard him breathe deeply for a moment as if he were thinking. “I volunteer in a charity hospital for children. I can’t afford to do outside work without pay. What can you give me? Can you at least fix some parking tickets?”

“Probably. Tell me the car and I’ll make some calls.”

“My girlfriend’s Mercedes. It’s in my name. I’m sure you can look it up. Last I checked, she had two or three dozen.”

I rubbed my brow.

“I’ll do what I can about the tickets.”

“Good. Come by the hospital tomorrow at ten. I get coffee then.”

“Fine. I’ll meet you there.”

I hung up the phone and stuck it back in my pocket. The meeting was in fourteen hours. Hopefully I’d still be alive.

I helped Hannah with the dishes for about twenty minutes before hopping in my car. It was earlier than I intended to head out, but I needed a drink and couldn’t get one at home. I stopped at a sports bar near Plainfield and had bourbon with a beer chaser. I felt like myself after that. The bar was relatively uncrowded, so I imagined The Abbey would be as well. Even still, if Azrael made a living selling coke to would–be vampires, he’d be there.

I finished my drinks and got back in my car at a quarter after nine. I drove through the now–familiar countryside. The parking lot outside The Abbey was about half–full. I saw several parking spots near the entrance, but I backed into a spot facing the exit on the edge of the lot. I didn’t anticipate problems, but shit happens and I wanted to be prepared if I had to leave in a hurry. I checked my firearm before stepping out of the car and onto the gravel lot.

The wind was strong enough that it whipped across the old church’s steeple, creating a low moaning sound. It was kind of creepy, actually. I slammed my door shut and pulled my jacket tight around me so my firearm wouldn’t be exposed. There were a few other people in the parking lot, and from what I could see, they were all wearing black clothes and various shades of dark makeup. A good number had facial piercings. I ignored them and walked toward the old church. Rope lights bathed the limestone steps in purple incandescence.

I stopped at the foot of the steps. There were three bouncers at the top. Two of them were big enough that they could have been
NFL
lineman, while the third was smaller and held a clipboard. He looked like a Slim to me. They were checking driver’s licenses and patting everyone down before they let them inside. I took my badge from my belt and held it up. The crowd parted in front of me until I reached the top steps. The larger two bouncers folded their arms across their chests, probably trying to look intimidating, while the smaller guy said something into a two–way radio. All three glared at me.