Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4) (21 page)

I only understood why when I got inside the elevator itself. Like at Black’s place, the penthouse apartment needed a key to get to the top.

The cop with the crew cut and the shy smile had the key. Following me into the elevator, he inserted the strangely cut piece of metal into the jagged key hole under the round numbers, twisted it sideways, and pressed the button for “PH” at the top.

Then he exited the elevator, smiling at me again and bowing his head.

Old school manners. Kind of nice. At least he wasn’t being weird to me, like Mozar and Glen and pretty much everyone else had been yesterday. I never once saw the uniform cop look lower than my eyes.

I was ridiculously glad to be wearing my own clothes again. Nick stopped by my apartment before dinner the night before so I could pack a bag for Angel’s, and I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to fill an overnight bag with my own shirts, my own pants and socks and skirts and shoes––and my own, clean supply of bras and underwear.

When I reached the top of the building, the doors opened directly into an apartment.

Whoever had lived here definitely had money.

Maybe not Black kind of money, but closer to that ballpark than most.

The view alone would have convinced me of that, even if it wasn’t for the fireplace embedded in the wall, surrounded by what looked like pure white marble. Expensive-looking art covered the walls, and a Chinese dragon made of pure jade covered most of the mantle. The porch outside those giant windows overlooked most of downtown and had a fire pit and a hot tub, along with a rock garden and expensive, dark-wood deck furniture surrounded by more modern art sculptures and more Chinese stone art. I even saw an antique-looking stone screen covered in more dragons, like something from the Forbidden City.

The guy had a bit of a China-dragon fetish.

Something about this felt familiar.

I couldn’t put my finger on what. I’d definitely never been here before.

Following the sounds of low voices, I walked across the length of those bay windows, which seemed to wrap around the entire flat, and entered an entertainment room. The apartment seemed to make up a single, long line that wrapped around the top of the hill, probably to maximize as much of the view as possible with the available square footage. The way it was designed, I wondered if some famous architect had built it.

I heard Nick’s voice as I approached what must have been the master bedroom.

Without waiting, I walked inside, and then immediately came to an abrupt stop.

I was used to crime scenes. I’d seen quite a few of them.

But this one was something else.

I stared up at a suspended, headless corpse, hanging over the bed.

It looked like he’d been decapitated after he’d been suspended, and hung upside down so the blood would pour down in a straight line until the heart stopped. The heart had then been removed, likely post-mortem from the lack of blood around the cuts in his chest.
 

When I looked down, I saw it––the heart, I mean.
 

The killer had placed it in a carved black wooden box, also Chinese-looking, and left it right in the middle of the bed.
 

The dark red sheets were black in the center from all of that blood, and visibly wet still, so this couldn’t have happened all that long ago. A few hours probably. Maybe less.

The coppery smell filled the room.

I stared at the man’s naked back and saw the same wing-like carvings there as I’d seen on Norberg. That strange, laddered A-symbol stood in the center, clean and much more easily readable this time, maybe because most of the blood had been drained out by the position of the corpse. There also seemed to be more writing.
 

“What does it say?” I said to no one in particular, pointing at the letters. “Is it readable?”

Nick answered from behind me. “Yes.”
 

I glanced back and saw him flipping through the notebook he carried. He found it a few seconds later.

“
They come to you looking gentle like sheep, but they are really dangerous like wolves
. You will know these people by what they do.”
Nick grunted, glancing up at me. “That one I’ve heard. I looked it up.
Matthew 7:14-16.”

Something else occurred to me. I looked around for the head, realizing only then that I’d never seen Norberg’s the day before.

“The heads,” I said, feeling foolish it hadn’t occurred to me before. “What does he do with the heads?”

I turned, looking at Nick once more, and he frowned. He glanced at Mozar, who I realized only then was the man standing next to him. The suit he wore today was the same color blue as his eyes. The material looked heavier, so more San Francisco-appropriate.

“It was in the hot tub, Miri,” Nick said, blunt. “Unlike Norberg, this one had been scalped. He pinned the scalp to the grass, like he was drying it.”

I grimaced. “And Norberg’s?”

“They picked it up last night,” Mozar said from next to Nick. “It washed ashore in the Marina. That one wasn’t scalped.”

I nodded, muttering, “Water.”

“It seems to be a theme, yes,” Mozar said, even though I hadn’t said it very loud.

When I glanced over, he aimed the pen he was holding at the new victim’s back and the laddered A symbol.

“We got a definition back on that. The closest seems to be ‘essence’ or ‘quintessence,’ although there’s some disagreement about the symbolic meanings. That, combined with some of the other symbols suggests that he sees his role as a ‘purification.’ It might be why he leaves the heads in water. Salt water, especially, has a purifying quality, it is believed.”

“The hot tub?” I said, frowning. I didn’t follow his pointing pen back to the corpse. “Kind of a stretch for purification.”

If Mozar noticed me avoiding looking at the corpse, he didn’t comment on it.
 

“The vic used salt in his hot tub to clean the water,” he explained. “Not chlorine.” At what must have been a puzzled look from me, he gestured vaguely with the pen. “It’s all the rage now. Better for your skin, apparently.”

I nodded, not sure if he was kidding or not.

I looked at Nick, who was frowning at me.

“You recognize him, Miri?” he said then.

I stared at Nick. Then I looked at the corpse, letting out a startled laugh. “What?”

“His name’s Dougal. James Gregory Dougal.”

That time I stared for real. Then I looked around the apartment, feeling a sick feeling drop my stomach into a hard, metallic-tasting knot. After looking around the bedroom, which appeared pristine apart from the mess over the bed and the bed itself, my eyes somehow made their way back to Nick and Mozar.

Mozar was staring between me and Nick, obviously puzzled.

“You didn’t tell him?” I said to Nick.

Nick opened his mouth, about to answer, when Angel walked into the bedroom behind me and immediately raised a hand to shield her eyes.

“Damn,” she said, grimacing as she stepped up next to me. “A little warning would have been nice.” Even so, apart from the barest trace of that grimace, she recovered fast. I could tell from her eyes she was already assessing the scene. Then she looked at me. Double-taking whatever she saw on my face, she glanced at Nick and frowned.
 

“What?” she said. “What’d I miss?”

“I was just wondering the same thing,” Mozar said, adjusting his belt and suit jacket as he looked between me and Nick.

Nick nodded towards the corpse. “It’s Dougal, Ang.”

There was a pause.

Then Angel’s eyes widened. She looked from me to the corpse. “Miri’s Dougal?”

Nick nodded.

Mozar sounded angry now. “Is someone going to explain?”

Nick sighed, looking at him. “Our vic was the prime suspect in the murder of the doc here’s sister. Zoe Fox, aged sixteen. We could never get him on it, but Zoe dated him for awhile, and the guy has a history of beating up his girlfriends...” Nick gave me an apologetic look. “He also stalked Miri here for awhile...”

When I met Nick’s gaze that time, I saw him pause, a different understanding flickering across his expression. When it hit me what that expression meant, I looked away.

“Did you think he was guilty, Miri?” Nick said. “Dougal?”

I knew what he was asking me.

He was asking me if I’d read Dougal’s mind.

He was asking if I knew who’d killed my sister.

I
had
read his mind, of course. Dougal hadn’t just hunted me. For awhile, I’d hunted him, as well. But I’d never been able to tell for sure. Not definitively. Not absolutely, one hundred percent for certain. I’d asked him about it to his face, more than once, trying to get him to think about whether he did it or not, trying to get proof, in my own mind at least.

If I’d gotten that proof, I’m pretty sure I would have killed him.

I knew I would have, even back then.

I looked at Nick, answering him with my eyes as much as my voice. “I don’t know, Nick,” I said, my voice tired. “I really don’t.”

I saw his expression clear somewhat.

Looking at him, I realized the same thing had occurred to him.

Meaning, if I had known like that––if I’d really known––there’s no way I would have left Dougal out on the street. If I couldn’t kill him, I would have found some way to put him behind bars. But I couldn’t decide for sure if he’d done it or not, and in the end, I had to admit maybe the cops had it wrong. Maybe I had it wrong, too. Every psychiatrist I’d ever seen told me to let it go, to not let that murder define me for the rest of my life.

I agreed with them. Mostly.

Enough to know I couldn’t spend the rest of my life following a sociopath around, trying to pin a crime on him when I had no evidence, and never got a single hard hit off him psychically that he’d been the one to kill my baby sister. After two years of reading that bastard’s mind, seeing him fantasize about hurting girls and women without ever getting a single, irrefutable memory off him of him doing it to Zoe, I had to let it go.

Anyway, he filed a restraining order against me in the end, and after I got back from my last tour in the Middle East, I told myself I had to let it go.

By then I’d seen enough death to last me a lifetime. I knew none of it would bring Zoe back, no matter how hard I obsessed, and after Afghanistan and then Iraq, all I really wanted was to feel like I was moving towards the light again, and away from the dark.

I’d spent too much time in the dark already.

So I let myself think of Dougal as dead after that.

I didn’t realize how quiet everyone had gotten until Angel wrapped an arm around my shoulders. I looked up, embarrassed, and wiped my eyes.

“Should I be worried?” I said, looking at Nick. “Or do you think it’s a coincidence?”

Nick frowned, glancing at Mozar.

Mozar never took his eyes off me.

Then movement pulled my eyes abruptly to the right, making me tense. I jerked my head around and found myself looking at Hawking, who I hadn’t even seen. He stood there, as still as a statue. Since he hovered right by the sliding glass door that led to the wraparound patio, I guessed he must have just come inside––but I hadn’t heard a sound if he had.

Apart from Black, I hadn’t seen anyone move that quietly since the war.
 

Either way, whether he’d just come from the patio or not, Hawking must have heard some of what we were talking about. For the very first time, I saw an expression on his face that wasn’t blank indifference. That expression looked like concern.

Hawking aimed his concern at me, his eyes as calm as a mountain lake.

I stared at the empathy shining out of his eyes until Nick spoke.

“I think we’d better call Black back in, doc.” Nick’s voice held a hint of his usual annoyance whenever Black’s name came up, but I heard the worry there, too. “He’s going to want to know this. And he’ll probably want his people on you, given everything.”