Death By Degrees (17 page)

Chapter Seventeen

L
ink and Kasia both looked up when the door opened. They had been crying, I could see it in their eyes. When they saw me they lit up, but when only Chen and I walked into the apartment they knew what that meant.

And the tears fell hard once more.

I ran to them and scooped them both into my arms. It took everything I had to hold back the tears. Instead of focusing on Kat, I focused on Crawford and the things I wanted to do to him. Anger was a better emotion for the time being, the kids needed to see strength, not sadness.

“Where’s mommy?”

“We haven’t gotten her back yet, Kasia. But we will. Everybody is looking for her and we’re going to find her and bring her home.”

“Will you find her tomorrow?”

“I hope so, Link. The police will keep looking tonight. I wanted to come home to you guys.”

“What happened to your face?”

“You know that stuff I had for work? Pepper spray? If you get it in your eyes it really burns. Daddy got something like that in his eyes as well.”

“But you look swollen.”

I touched my face and could feel a bit of swelling on my cheeks and around my eyes. Must have reacted to it worse than I thought. I remembered when a couple of officers arrested a guy after a bar fight, they’d had to spray him. Unfortunately for him, he was a very fair-skinned redhead. I had never seen anyone’s face go so red; it was as if he had been out in the sun for far too long..

My dark skin tone saved me from some of that. Must have been the Irish side that was swelling up.

“I’ll be fine. It won’t last long.”

“Is mommy okay?”

My mind raced. How much did they know about Crawford? How much had they overheard?

“I think so, she’s probably just a little worried.”

“Doesn’t the bad man k-”

“Kasia, honey. I’m sure she’s okay. We’re going to find her.”

Maybe I was lying, maybe I was protecting them from what could be, but it was a conversation I wasn’t prepared to have with them. Not yet, not when things were still so fresh. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was dead, but the more I thought about it the more I believed Crawford would keep her alive.

I just hoped that I was right.

The kids had been staying with Julie, Aidan and Anya while Chen and I were searching for Kat. We stayed for a little longer; it gave the kids some more time to spend with their friends. I hoped that it would take their minds off of things – even if it was only for a few minutes.

“He had the whole thing planned out then? Traps and everything? Who the hell is this guy?” The kids were watching television while Julie, Chen and I talked quietly in the kitchen.

“He’s smart and he’s crafty. I’ll give him that. But he’s nuts. Thinks he’s doing God’s work,” I said.

“Do you think… I’m sorry, Lincoln. I shouldn’t ask.”

I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We don’t have anything saying he keeps people alive, but this is different. He had set out to kill sixty-six and he has. I don’t know if he needs to kill her. I hope he doesn’t.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to throw you off your game, Lincoln. It might be a distraction,” Chen said.

“How so?”

“So he can pull off this grand finale of his.”

“Shit. Tie everyone up looking for Kat and he’s free and clear to do whatever he has planned. Fuck.”

“I know, Link. It’s not like we’re going to pull resources off of looking for Kat, but if we don’t… we’re screwed either way.”

I thought about it for a moment, toying with ideas of what to do. There was no good way to handle this. I wanted every ounce of our resources being used to find Kat, but we had no idea what he had planned. The outcome could end up being far worse and could lead to her death anyway.

“We need to figure out what he has planned,” I said. “It may be the only way to find Kat. Right now, we’ve got nothing to say where she is. If we catch him again or stop him, maybe we can get her back.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’re just going to be going in circles searching for her. And unless we start kicking down every door, we aren’t going to find her.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath; there was no relaxation to be found in it though – he was there once more and he was running from us. “Have you heard from anyone? Are we sure that he got away again?”

“They found a single set of tire tracks not far from where the body was,” Chen said. “He may have had a dirt bike or something set up for an escape. As far as we can tell, Link, he’s gone again.”

“Fuck,” I said. My fist down came down hard on the table.

“We’ll get him, Link. We got him once.”

“Because he let us. You really think he did those searches without a proxy and bought shit from the stores down the street from his apartment by accident? Like he forgot he was a wanted man? He barely even tried to hide his identity in the stores. He wanted us to find him.”

“Doesn’t matter, Link. We’ll find him again.”

I just shook my head.

I took the kids back to our apartment an hour later and we all climbed into the bed in the master bedroom. Two guards sat in the living room, standing guard more for the kids than for me. If it had just been me, I’d have told them to leave. But I couldn’t trust that Crawford wouldn’t try something else.

The kids asked more questions and I tried to remain positive, tried to give them something to grasp on to.   I could tell it wasn’t enough. They could hope for the best all they wanted, but nothing was ever going to be the same until Kat was here with us once more.

When my phone rang, we all sat straight up in the bed I fumbled to answer it as fast as I could.

“Hello?”

“Lincoln, it’s Kara. Oh, sorry, you were probably…”

“It’s okay.”

“I just wanted to see how you were doing. And how the kids were.”

“Thanks. We’re surviving. It’s about all we can do right now.”

“Eddie and I are still working on this, we’re back at headquarters. Take your time with the kids, okay? They need you.”

“Kara, this isn’t your fault.”

“I want to believe you, Lincoln. I really do. But you heard him.”

“Please, don’t blame yourself.”

She sounded upset and I thought I could hear her sniffling in the background.

“I need to go, Eddie needs something. Stay strong, Lincoln. We’ll find her.”

She hung up before I could say anything else. We were all dealing with this in different ways. If Kara needed to dive headlong into the work to get through it, I couldn’t fault her. I wanted to be there as well, but the two little people lying on either side of me, their arms draped across my chest, needed me more.

“It wasn’t mommy?”

“No, honey. Not this time. It’s getting late though, we should go to sleep, okay?”

“Are you going to go looking for her tomorrow, daddy?”

“I think so, Link. Are you guys okay to hang out with Aidan and Anya again?”

“Yeah. Do we have to go to school?”

“I think I can convince Julie to keep you all home.”

“Okay,” Kasia said. “I don’t want to go back to school right now. Those people got hurt there.”

“I know, honey. But that won’t happen again, okay?”

“Okay.”

Their eyelids looked so heavy; a combination of the time and the tears weighed them down. It didn’t take them long to fall asleep. It always amazed me how easily kids could sleep even as the world fell apart around them. I knew I was going to be awake most of the night, unable to shut down the thoughts that careened through my mind.

They woke up a couple of times, startled awake by some bad dream coursing through the night. I’d hold them tighter and before I knew it they were back asleep once more. I managed to doze off a couple of times, but every time I did I saw her face and heard her voice.

She was calling out to me, begging me to save her.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he next morning when the kids woke up I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. My eyes were burning, although that may have been more the aftereffects of the tear gas and flash bangs then from the lack of sleep. Either way, I was exhausted.

I made breakfast for us – eggs, bacon and pancakes. We all kept looking at the empty seat, the empty placemat, throughout the meal. The looks on their faces were killing me. There is no worse pain in life than to see your children suffer. And they were suffering. Neither one of them was good at hiding their feelings; I had long ago learned to read them like the open books that they were.

We finished our breakfast and I walked them over to Chen and Julie’s apartment. They seemed to perk up a bit when they saw Aidan and Anya, but not as much as I had hoped.

“We have to go kids, you guys try and have some fun today and we’ll be home in a bit.” They both looked sad to see me go, but it was when they hugged me I knew it was alright for me to leave.

“Go find her, daddy,” Link said. “She’s probably getting bored waiting.”

I had to smile. The things kids said. I stepped back then leaned in to give them each a kiss on the forehead.

“I’ll be back,” I said, “as soon as I can be. Be good for Julie, okay.”

They both nodded.

I took that as my cue to leave. I wanted to get out before the emotions had a chance to build up. The more we hugged and the more we talked, the harder it became.

Chen and I took the elevator to the main floor then walked out the front door of the building. The walk to INTERPOL was a short one, but we took a cab in today. We had a lot of work to do.

“Did they sleep at all last night?”

“Yeah,” I said, watching the other cars pass by. “Woke up a couple of times but they went back to sleep alright. Bad dreams, I figure. We all slept in the same bed, I didn’t want to let them go.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Barely.”

“Yeah, you look like shit.”

I laughed. “Just realized I didn’t shave.”

“Or put on a tie.”

“Really? Why didn’t you say something?”

“Just noticed now. Surprised Julie didn’t say anything. No one is going to care, Link. You could show up in your boxers.”

“I bet that Eddie and Kara won’t even notice. She called last night, said they were still working. They probably haven’t even slept yet.”

“I can only imagine the music Eddie was playing to stay awake. Thank God for Najat though… I think he made Kara uncomfortable.”

“You noticed it too, eh?”

Chen just nodded. “Strange dude, but apparently very good at what he does.”

“Yeah, he is,” I said. “On both counts.”

The cab dropped us off outside and I handed him some euros to cover the cost.

Kara and Eddie barely noticed us walk in, they both looked like zombies that had been killed then brought back to life a second time. Kara’s hair was all over the place and Eddie had the darkest circles I had ever seen.

“You guys need sleep,” I said as I walked up to them.

“Can’t,” Eddie said. “We’re on to something.”

“We didn’t want to call you yet, we’re still trying to figure it out.” Kara stood up and walked over to the screen then started tapping at various places. Different windows opened up making a cluster of photos and documents on the screen.

“Fuck. Eddie, it’s your program. You do it. I don’t get this thing.”

“Alright. Remember when Kat was…” He paused, probably thinking he shouldn’t have mentioned her. I nodded for him to go on. “When she was here she helped us get onto the whole Revelations aspect. She reminded you about the burial direction, and you had asked me to look into that before. I did, but it all seemed random. There wasn’t any pattern with them, so I abandoned the idea. A lot of the burials seemed to go with the lay of the land, so it seemed like he just dug the graves whichever way was easiest.”

He wasn’t rambling anymore. Whether he’d become more comfortable with us or it was because he was so focused, he went straight to the point. It didn’t matter why, Eddie had changed so much in the short time since the investigation started. He seemed far more confident, and with Najat by his side, much happier as well.

“But you found something now?”

“I watched the video from you interviewing him.”

“Not my proudest moment.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t do worse.” There was an awkward silence before he continued. “You brought up the upside-down crosses that were carved into the victim’s skulls. He said it was a matter of perspective.”

“What? Like they’re actually right-side-up?”

“If you look from the head to the feet they are. So I thought about the locations and the burials. They couldn’t be random, nothing he’s done has been random.”

I was getting a little impatient. I just wanted to know what he had found. He typed a few things into the keyboard and red dots showed up on the map, one for every body we had found. Then an arrow pointed from each body.

“Okay, those arrows represent the direction from the feet to the head. Notice anything?”

“Yeah. How did we miss that? They all point inward.”

“Right.” A few more keystrokes and the lines extended, eventually crossing over one another almost all at the same point. “And there it is.”

“Where is that?”

“Not a hundred percent sure. It’s not exact.”

The lines disappeared and were replaced by another dot, this one larger than the others.

“Israel,” I said.

“Yes. There haven’t been any killings there yet which I find a little odd.”

“So this is where it ends then. Can you narrow it down?”

“That’s what I’m working on now, trying to see which city is the likely target. Right now though, I’d have to say Jerusalem. It’s the closest one, and just given the historical and religious significance it seems the likely place.”

I nodded. “Good work, Eddie.”

He smiled then looked down quickly, as though he wasn’t supposed to be happy right now.

“That’s not it, Lincoln,” Kara said. “I can’t count the number of times I read Revelations last night. Might be part of the reason I haven’t slept yet, I’ll probably have nightmares if I ever do.”

“It’s pretty messed up.”

“That’s an understatement. There’s a lot to do with numbers in there, a lot to do with seven but also with three-and-a-half. Stuff about leaving bodies in the streets of Jerusalem for three-and-a-half days, the beast had power for three-and-a-half years. They talk about twelve-sixty as well. There were three hundred and sixty days in the Hebrew calendar, so three-and-a-half years is twelve hundred and sixty days total.”

“Three-and-a-half years? When did this all start?”

“Exactly. But we have to go with the Hebrew year, like in the Bible. Or that’s what I think. If we do, then from the first killing it’ll be twelve-hundred-sixty days on Friday.”

“Friday?” I looked at the calendar on the wall; I had no idea what day of the week it was. “Today’s Wednesday.”

“I know,” Kara said. “So we don’t have much time.”

That was our job now, we had to find out what he had planned and where it would happen. That was one part of it anyway. If we found out where he was going, maybe we could find out where Kat was.

“You two need to get some sleep. You’ve both done incredible work. Thank you.”

“We still haven’t found her, Lincoln,” Kara said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. We need to know what he has planned. She might be part of it. Now go, get some sleep.”

“Just a couple of hours, I’m going to go to the lounge room and have a nap. Even if you order me, I’m staying here.”

I nodded. There was no point fighting with her.

“Actually, Lincoln. Can I talk to you for a minute? Alone?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. We left the office and went into an unused adjacent room. The moment the door closed Kara started crying.

“I’m so sorry, Lincoln. All of this is my fault.”

“Kara, it’s not. If anything he probably was just trying to get you riled up in there as well.”

“But he’s right, Link.” She hadn’t called me Link in a long time. Not since… “I still have feelings for you. And I can’t help but think that maybe if I didn’t, none of this would’ve happened.”

“You don’t know that. Crawford is clearly insane, he might have taken Kat anyway.”

“It’s just…” The emotions and exhaustion had gotten to her and while I figured she really believed what she was saying, it seemed like she had let her mind take it a step to far. “I had feelings for you before everything happened, before Saunders, before we… slept together. Almost from the start, Link, back when I first came to homicide. And I tried to fight it, Link, trust me I tried. Every day I told myself that it would never work, that you and I can’t be together. And then with what happened, for a moment there I thought maybe everything was coming together. It was horrible of me because for a moment, I didn’t care about the fact it would mean you leaving Kat and the kids. I just wanted to be happy.”

“Kara, I’m sorry. I never knew.”

“I know you didn’t, you’re just as blind to that as every other guy. And I didn’t want you to know. But now, if she’s… if she’s been hurt or killed because of me? I’ll never forgive myself.”

“You have to. You didn’t cause this.”

“I wish I was so sure. I can’t do this anymore, Link. And I’m so sorry for bringing it up now, but I feel so guilty about it. We’re going to get Kat back and then I’m leaving homicide, I can’t be around you. All it does is cause everyone pain.”

She was so upset she was shaking. She had sat down on a chair as we spoke and now, with her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, she looked even smaller than she really was. Tears streamed down her freckled face, her usually bright green eyes lost behind a wall of sorrow.

I tried to say something but she stopped me. She didn’t want me to try to prevent her from doing what she thought was right. Instead, she turned and left the room to find somewhere quiet to take a break. I had a feeling she wouldn’t be able to get much rest.

Maybe Crawford had taken Kat because of Kara and I. If he did, the blame was on me just as much as it was on her – maybe even more.

I went back into the office to make sure Eddie knew it was break time as well.

“Kara’s gone to find somewhere to sleep. Eddie, same for y-”

Eddie was already asleep, his head resting on the desk beside the keyboard he’d been typing at just minutes before. I shook his shoulder and woke him up.

“Eddie, if you won’t go home, go find a couch or something. Chen and I will take over, you need some sleep.”

He nodded then stood up and left the room; his shoulder bounced off the doorframe on his way out.

“So,” Chen said, drawing it out for a few seconds. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d be worse than Kara with Eddie’s computer stuff. And she seems to know more about Revelations now than anyone else here. I want to go to Crawford’s apartment and tear it apart. Maybe he left something there that could lead us to Kat. And we should talk to the officer from the school that survived.”

Chen nodded. “They tried to speak to her. She barely remembers anything. They figure it’s amnesia due to the trauma. Nothing that will help us there, nothing more than we already know. As far as the apartment goes, they got the warrant for the place so we’re free to go. It’s still under guard.”

“Did they find anything?”

“No. But they aren’t us.”

We arrived at Crawford’s apartment about twenty minutes later and showed our ID cards to the National Police officers guarding the door. The apartment looked almost the same as when I had last seen it although it wasn’t as tidy as it had been. The warrant had given us free reign to search anywhere and for anything and the officers had clearly taken that to heart.

Not that it mattered. They hadn’t found anything at all to tie Crawford to the crimes. It was just the standard apartment one would expect for a man of Crawford’s age and marital status. A bachelor pad, for lack of a better term.

I knew there had to be something beneath the obvious. He had wanted us to find him at the apartment, he had given us what we needed to find him there. If he had just wanted to be caught, he could have walked a little too close to a cruiser on the street, been recognized and slapped into cuffs. He had lured us to his apartment for a reason and I needed to figure out what that was. We had to look past the sparsely decorated apartment, the purchased-for-function IKEA furniture, the one of everything.

I did notice that the pillow I had shot, the one that had been right beside Crawford, was nowhere to be seen. It made me wonder where it had gone to even if there were really only two options: the evidence locker or the trash.

Crawford had not been expecting company, had probably never even had company. He lived a meager existence and seemed content that way. The sofa was the only thing built for more than one person and even that had only an end table on one side. I pictured him lying down to watch television, the table behind his head a place for drinks or remote controls. When we barged into the apartment to arrest him, he’d been sitting in the middle of the couch like he would have been if he had just sat up. This apartment had not been shared with anyone.