Payback (2 page)

It had been his lifelong dream to become a cop and then he had been one for almost ten years at that point. His life was always on the line and he took a lot of pride in helping his community, but with a city like Phoenix, crime was always an uphill battle. No matter how many criminals you put behind bars there were twenty waiting to take their place the next day. It was a losing battle, but they soldiered on and continued to do their best day in and day out for the city that they loved. That was all you could do.

As Brian poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot in his office he thought more and more about the idea he had been mulling over lately. He was thinking about starting up his own security company. There he could still serve the community and still help catch bad guys, but he would be his own boss and he would be in charge of everything. He could run things the way he wanted and he could work his own hours. And it was still police work. It was still the thing he loved to do, but without all of the bullshit that went along with it that he hated nowadays.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

The voice at the door belonged to Chief Arnold. The man was in his sixties but he had more energy than a teenager. Even at the early hour the man looked like he had been up all night choking back on caffeine pills. Brian would never know where he found the energy because he had it on good authority that the man only slept four hours a night and had done so for most of his life. The old guy was up at the crack of dawn every morning to go for a five mile jog.

Brian leaned back and patted what was starting to become a rather impressive spare tire on his stomach and belched silently as the coffee settled down. He had to laugh at the old guy though. Ever since his dad had died of a heart attack six years before, Brian had really started thinking of Chief Arnold as a father figure. He had practically been one to him since he was a kid anyway.

“What are you talking about? I’m not that late. Traffic was a bitch. I think I’m catching a cold,” Brian said trying to riff of phony excuses. That was a running joke that he and the chief had ran for years. It never got old really. He loved it. But the chief was not even paying attention right then.

“I figured you would be at the murder scene. You heard about it right? I know you are getting a bit slow in your old age, Brian, but I do expect you to keep abreast of breaking developments.”

“Oh, yea, I heard. But it was already on the news. I figured you had the guys you needed on this thing,” Brian said wolfing down more coffee. He figured in six more cups he would almost feel human.

“Well, yea. I do. But this is kind of close to home so I figured that no one would be able to pull you away from this thing.”

“Well, I’m over it. I just hope that Amber doesn’t see it for a while,” Brian said.

Arnold’s eyes glazed over as if he had just thought of that idea. He often became so excited by things that were happening that he lost all sense of logic. Amber did not need to know that there had been another murder in the area with the same M.O. She had not had any nightmares for almost two years and Brian was starting to feel that the therapy was becoming unnecessary now.

That was what had prompted her to go to the therapy in the first place—the nightmares. They had started about a year after the abduction. It always started the same way where she was abducted in the parking garage and then kept trapped in the dark trunk for hours, with very little in the way of air. It seemed like just when she was starting to pass out the Carver would open the trunk and make her listen to some of his ramblings. She never knew where they were because she was always blindfolded. It sickened Brian to just think about it. It had been a miracle that she was not another one of the Carver’s helpless victims.

Brian counted his lucky stars every day that she was his wife.

“Yea, I didn’t even think about Amber. Shit, I’m sorry,” Arnold said.

“It’s ok, chief. You are a busy man with a lot of stuff on his old, wrinkled mind,” Brian joked.

The chief smiled.

“You are such a scoundrel. You know you are the only person who can really get away with that, right?” Arnold said.

“I like to think I can dump on you when I want,” a familiar voice sprang up behind Arnold.

John came walking into Brian’s office just then wolfing down a large donut. The guy was skinny as a rail no matter what he ate and he was almost never without a piece of junk food in his mouth. It was unfair and Brian had to hate John just a little bit for it. He definitely took after his mother’s side of the family. While the chief was a big, burly man his wife was tall and slender. She looked like a supermodel and no one on God’s green earth had ever been able to understand how John’s dad had pulled a top notch looking woman like that. But Brian knew that the chief was the kind of guy who could talk his way out of anything. If he had not been a cop, and such a damn good one, Arnold could have easily have enjoyed a career as a talk show host or a used car salesman.

“Ok, I see how it is; I’m being gang raped here,” Arnold said.

“Pretty much. Hey, Brian did you hear about the copycat murder of the Carver?” John asked.

“I already tried, but the guy is just not interested,” Arnold said.

“I’m sorry to burst your bubble guys,” Brian said. “I do have a lot of other work to do. Why do I feel like this is some sort of an intervention?”

“Well, we couldn’t help but notice that you seem crazy bored and preoccupied lately,” John said.

“I’m not that bored. But yea, sometimes the job does get you down a bit. It’s normal. It happens.”

“But not to you. You are the guy who loves this place more than anyone and sometimes it seems like you would rather be elsewhere lately.”

Brian groaned. He had been found out. They knew that he was getting burned out and that he was unhappy. Had it affected his job performance? He didn’t know. Was it just the attitude that he brought with
him nowadays? Brian didn’t really want to get into it right then. He was still trying to wake up and fight off the urge to take a long morning nap. The seven hours of sleep he’d had last night were just not cutting it. Usually he lasted until the
mid-point of the day before he decided that he wanted to curl up and take a long nap, but lately it was getting to him pretty much all the time.

“I’m fine, guys.’ Brian insisted.

“Well, ok but let us know if we can help cheer you up,” John said.

“I don’t need cheering up. I’m ok. I am just going through a rough spell. I just turned forty. That is allowed,” Brian said pouring some more coffee. The pot was almost empty. That was the thing he hated about having his own coffee pot in his office—it was too damn small. He was too lazy to walk out to the common room to actually get some coffee and get some exercise while he was at it. He often swore that he could hear his blood start to coagulate in his arteries from lack of movement.

“I never did,” Arnold said.

“Well, you have more energy than the energizer bunny,” Brian said.

“Well, he does have a point dad. You are a bad frame of reference here,” John joked.

The chief hit him on the arm and started to leave the office.

“You guys got to stop ganging up on me in the morning,” the chief said.

Brian could not help but laugh as the man walked out.

“So, you want to play some racquet ball tonight after work?” John asked.

Brian groaned. “That sounds like it would require a lot of effort.”

“Wow, this is not the dude I grew up with,” John replied.

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Brian replied. “Actually, I think that Amber has plans to cook the family a healthy dinner tonight and then it is game time.”

“Game time?”

“Yea, it is once a week thing where she insists that we all get together as a family and enjoy some games and festivities.”

John could not stifle the laughter.

“It’s not that funny,” Brian said. “It is really cool actually.”

Arnold burst back into the office just then. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

“There’s been another murder. Just like the Carver. It’s a double homicide this time.”

Brian slipped his jacket back on and headed out of the office behind John and the chief.

Brian could not believe what he had just seen. Two victims in a fairly nice neighborhood who had just been skinned alive. It was all coming back to him now just like it had back then. He had only worked on one of the crime scenes when this originally went down back in the day, but it was like the whole thing was happening all over again.

Now they knew that this was not the work of the actual Carver. Ian Jeffries was still behind bars rotting away on death row as he had been the past ten years. Brian still could not believe that the court kept granting the man appeal after appeal, just wasting tax payer’s dollars to keep him alive. The man had butchered several people and terrorized an entire community. Why were they keeping him alive? It sickened Brian, and not just because he had a personal connection to it now. It was more than that.

This murder was a young a couple. They had only been married for six weeks and were just starting their lives together. Why was this psycho doing this? Did Jeffries have some brainwashed kid working for him out here? Was that what happened? Brian knew that Jeffries had his fans and that he had confessed to far more murders than anyone even knew about. The man had even claimed to have a partner but none of this had ever been verified. They were mostly just the ramblings of a lunatic on death row.

Ian Jeffries had a big online presence apparently from what Brian had gathered. Amber had no idea he did this, but Brian routinely checked out Jeffries online finger prints to see if there was anything being talked about in regards to his crimes. Jeffries himself was not allowed internet access of any sort, but Brian knew that in prison there were ways to get around that. He could bribe guards or other inmates to go online for him. Why in the hell they let any inmate have access to the internet in a maximum security prison was something that would forever boggle Brian’s mind. It was just one of several things that were leaving him bored of the job lately. There were just too many inconsistencies. He was tired of it all.

But he had to admit standing outside enjoying the fresh air in the ninety eight degree temperature when it was only ten in the damn morning was a bit refreshing. A lot of people could not take the heat in the summer in southern Arizona, but it really didn’t bother him at all. He had grown up there and he actually enjoyed it.

He had felt the first little twinge of excitement in a long time. Was this what it took? A few people getting completely butchered for him to feel anything with this job anymore? He knew that he needed to step out and find something else, and fast. But right now he had a case to solve.

The biggest thing at the moment was media control. Brian had remembered a bit on how this should go down, but he still hated it. The media of today were even more relentless than they used to be because of the technology at their disposal. They could get the information onto blogs and social media within seconds from phones and a host of other devices. That was why it was even more adamant that the cops not say a word about anything at the crime scene.

Brian finished his cigar—he had tried to quit way too many times—and stepped back into the house. The crime had actually happened in the upstairs master bedroom, but the entire house was swimming with cops and it all was being treated as a crime scene. Any time there was that much room for evidence to be collected then they had to operate that way.

But he still hated the hustle and bustle of a homicide scene.

Brian had asked to be moved from homicide to vice about a year before. He had grown tired of seeing thing like this and the only reason he was actually there now was because of his history with the case. There was only so many dead bodies that one could see before they just could not take it anymore. He had reached his limit of watching the awful things that people could do to each other a long time ago.

But this case was his he felt. Arnold and John had not even asked him to step back because it was technically not his beat. One copycat murder was a random coincidence but two separate crime scenes—one of them being a double murder—was a message. Someone was trying to tell them something. What was it? What was going on here?

“Any prints? You guys finding any semblance of this thing called evidence?” The chief walked around barking at the forensic geeks. He was getting annoyed and bullying them around a bit, which usually indicated they had not found shit. The chief could not stand when there was no evidence at a crime scene. There was a little known fact that if a murder was not solved in forty-eight hours then it was probably not going to be solved. That was too true too many times, Brian thought. If there was no physical evidence collected at the scene and they were not able to establish any motive, then the case would go cold and the killer would walk in ninety five percent of the cases. Just thinking about it pissed Brian off.

The head lab geek looked up from dusting for prints and said no. The chief walked away disgusted. Brian tried to ignore the smell but the entire house smelled like death. The bodies had been sitting there rotting for close to forty-eight hours. They had been discovered when the husband’s employer had come looking for him when he had not reported to work or so much as called off sick for two days. When the employer arrived they noticed signs of foul play. Noticeably the smell as soon as they walked in.

The stench of death was unmistakable for anyone and when you walked into the house it hit you in the face with a huge wave of disgusting that turned your stomach almost instantly. The smell was churning Brian’s stomach at that very second and making him regret every morsel of food that had gone into his body that morning. He had to get out of there soon. He just wasn’t cut out for homicide anymore. His body and mind had started to reject it before; that was why he had gotten out of it. He was a zombie at home and his mental and physical being had been in dire jeopardy.