The Blood Dahlia (The Dark Angel Mysteries Book 1) Page 3

  Lynch never found who was responsible for all the body parts. As mysteriously as it started, it stopped. Not completely though, it still happens from time to time, but not every day. It was that way before, too, just a fact of life in New Metro.

  5

  “Another long day at the office, sir?”

  “Yep, T. It kept my nose to the grindstone all day long,” Lynch replied.

  “Shame on me, I thought the scotch on your breath was why your nose was red.”

  Lynch cut a look at his metal friend before resuming his normal after-work routine. His suit jacket was hung on the coat rack, where Totter would later grab it and clean it before returning it back to the same hook for Lynch to grab on his way out the next day. The under-shoulder holster was unstrapped and placed on the table inside his study. A quick stop at the bar to fix his scotch before he collapsed into his leather couch. The cushions were well-worn and fitted to his body by the repeated impacts of his body weight through the years. His hand searched the floor for the remote. It didn’t have a particular spot on the floor where he kept it, it went wherever it landed when he fell asleep.

  After a lengthy search, by his standards, his fingers caught the edge of the remote, which had mostly slid under his couch. Like every night, he clicked through the channels, not pausing more than a second or so to digest what was on. Unlike earlier, he couldn’t find anything as entertaining as axe throwing. What he found was a little less violent. It was dart throwing. They weren’t in any big arena or television studio for this event. The event was happening in a normal pub in Ireland. A few stood around and watched, but in the background, you could hear the sounds of drinks being had and songs being sung. His mouth watered for the corned beef on rye he’d had in a pub when he visited Ireland, on one of the few vacations he took in his younger days, or as he called them, the days he was still dumb and innocent.

  Lynch yelled, “T, what’s for dinner?”

  Totter said, down the hallway where the laundry was, “A roast. It is ready on the stove for you.”

  “That will have to do, will have to do,” said Lynch as he pried his body out of the body-shaped holes in his sofa. He made a plate and returned to the sofa to eat and watch the darts. The roast was good, that fact was always a surprise to him, even though Totter had been with him for over ten years. How something that couldn’t taste could make something so moist and full of spice and flavor was one of the true mysteries of the world.

  With a full stomach and the plate on the floor where Totter would gather it later, Lynch settled in for some more darts. That was what played on the television when he fell asleep, and for the second night the screams took him before the scotch could do the job. The screams he heard as his eyes closed were frequent visitors. Some nights the screams started before his consciousness gave in to sleep completely. That happened tonight, and he responded to the familiar scream with, “Be there in a minute, Claudette.” These ghosts haunted him more than those he saw during the daylight.

  She wasn’t a client, a job, or a curiosity. It was just a situation of Lynch being in the right, or wrong, place at the right, or wrong, time. He was leaving Stiffies after a couple of drinks with Lucas and a few others from the force. Not wanting to push the limits of their camaraderie and the thin blue line that binds the brothers, both on and off the force, he walked home. It was only a few blocks back to his brownstone anyway.

  He was rounding the block to head for home when he heard a scream coming from the house to his left. Minding his own business, he kept walking until he heard the scream again, followed by the sound of something large landing in the house. The former police officer, and current private detective, in him wouldn’t let him take another step without checking it out. He split through the bushes that lined the walkway to the steps that led to the front door. The screams continued as he mounted the stairs, being mindful to stay as silent as he could. He had no clue what he was walking into, but it appeared domestic on the surface, which set his nerves on end. Those were the most dangerous calls he’d dealt with as a cop.

  On the front porch, he looked for a way to see inside. There were windows, but the thought about walking across a wooden porch, where his footsteps would thud and the chance of hitting a creaky board was high, didn’t agree with his plan to stay quiet. The two small panes of glass in the door were dirty and smudged, but even if they were clean, all he would have been able to see were the stairs that led to the second floor. With no other option, he crouched down and took three careful steps to the edge of the closest window. He had a suspicion what was happening upstairs, but was surprised when his eyes first saw the dark shadow of an individual standing there in the middle of the room.

  He scanned a little more and thought he saw someone else, but lower. Then a third person walked in. Lynch wondered to himself why the third person was undoing his pants. Then he realized what this was and stood up to confirm. Still standing just at the edge of the window, he saw one well-built man with his back to him, his pants up around his waist, but his belt dangled on the side next to the gun he held in his hand. It was just a small 9mm, based on the size of it, but it still shot bullets just fine. Another man, taller than the first, was walking into the room undoing his pants. A third was on the floor, with a woman pinned underneath him.

  There was no way he could walk away now, but he was pretty drunk and no match for what appeared to be three younger, athletic, and armed assailants. He had one advantage and slipped just below the surface of the world. The fog created by his night full of scotches cleared. He yanked up the collar of his old duster, that thankfully he grabbed on the way out, and tilted down the front brim of the hat. The world around him melted into the world below the world. A place he was very familiar with. A place where he had the advantage over the living. Behind him, a gathering of spectral images looked on at the commotion. He didn’t remember seeing them before, but didn’t doubt they were there. Sometimes he saw them, sometimes he didn’t. A gentleman in a brown suit and derby pointed toward the door with urgency. Lynch looked back at the man, who didn’t speak, they rarely did, and responded. “I know. I know.”

  Besides the dull throbbing headache that accompanied visits to this place, the old body felt renewed and invincible as he reached down and removed a shoe. He threw the shoe to the other end of the porch, letting it thud loudly in the calm quiet night. As he had hoped, the man standing turned to go investigate, but first he did his belt. Lynch thought to himself, idiot, as he waited for the man to leave. When he did, he rushed toward the door and through it in a single kick, letting the door crash into whoever was now crossing in front to check the noise he’d heard. Before the other two knew what had happened, two .45 caliber slugs pierced through the air and then their skulls, sending both men to the floor in heaps of tissue with fountains of blood pouring out of them. Just before he turned, he saw their spirits standing over what remained of their physical forms, watching themselves take their last breaths. They were not sad, confused was more like it. It was the reaction Lynch saw every time, at the moment of death, and it didn’t last long. He learned the lesson more than once. One should never hang around and watch the dead realize they were dead, especially when you were the cause of their death. They didn’t take too kindly to that and, in most cases, wanted to return the favor.

  Lynch imagined what he saw of the house and returned back to the world he shared with the victim and the thugs. The woman screamed at his sudden appearance, but before Lynch went to care for her, he turned his attention to the young man that was under the door. He wasn’t dead. He lay there groaning, only semi-conscious, a state that changed to being fully aware of his surroundings when Lynch shoved the still-smoking muzzle of his gun into his mouth.

  “Now, I could leave you for the cops to deal with. You could get a real slick lawyer who will try to get you off, but if I had to guess, your DNA is all inside that woman over there, and it won’t be hard to convict you. Do you know what they do to rapists in jail? The s
tories I have heard even turned my cold dark heart. Why don’t you grab this gun and do yourself a favor, pull the trigger? Save yourself some pain and save her the pain of having to testify against you.”

  Two wide white eyes stared up at Lynch from the blonde white male assailant, who was probably no more than 25 years old. His body shook and his teeth chattered against the barrel, but he made no other move to try to get away, or to fight for his life. Lynch reached down and grabbed his left hand and put it firmly on the gun, with a finger on the trigger.

  “From what I hear, after a week in jail, you will never be constipated again.” Lynch continued, “Those that don’t make you their own, will make you a punching bag and beat you within an inch of death on a daily basis. AND, I know what you are thinking, the prison guards will protect you. Nah, they will stand by and watch. In that world, you are just one rung above a child molester.”

  The gunshot thundered in the house. Lynch removed the assailant's hand from the gun and then wiped it off on the dead man’s chest before holstering it back under his own arm. He gave a look over at the victim, who was sitting on the floor, backed up as far as she could against her sofa, eyes wide with shock as she watched what had just transpired in front of her. He kept his distance and moved slowly as he retrieved the little 9mm the man had dropped when the door hit him. He popped out the clip and emptied three bullets out of it and pushed it back in. It clicked closed. He then placed it in the dead man’s hand and positioned it close to his head.

  “You are safe now, ma’am. What you are going to do now is call the cops and wait for them to arrive. They will tell you what to do after that. You don’t need to mention that I was ever here, just that they turned on each other. Have a good night now.” Lynch stepped over the body on his way out and disappeared into the shadows of the night.

  At a distance, a voice that was familiar, but not enough to place it, echoed, “Grow Beyond.”

  Like many times before, Lynch responded, “Beyond what?” The voice never answered back, and the dream faded into darkness filled by a restless sleep.

  “What do we do with the corpse?” a female voice said just outside the boundaries of sleep.

  Totter responded with, “I could dig a hole in the basement. The odor of his life has soaked into this place, that should mask the smell of his death.”

  Now fully awake, “I am alive, you twats.”

  6

  “Business that slow, you are doing house calls now?” Lynch asked Gina.

  “Get up, we do have business to talk about. Your business.”

  Not feeling that motivated by her statement, he rolled toward the back of the couch with every intention of going back to sleep. Of course, that was his intention. Gina had other intentions and kicked the foot that dangled off the edge of the couch.

  “Hey, now. I have shot people for less than that,” Lynch half-heartedly warned.

  “Then you best either wake up and talk to me, or go ahead and shoot me.”

  Gina always held a large percentage of the pain in his ass through the years. More times than he could remember, he’d stuck his neck out for her, or went a little beyond the expectations of being human, to keep her out of jail or other less comfortable situations. Part of that pain was her persistence. She was a bulldog with a chew toy. She wouldn’t let go of something until she was tired of it. If he never let her talk to him about whatever harebrained thought she had running through her over drug-stimulated brain she wouldn’t drop it. If he wanted her to drop it, he better just hear her out, and then go back to sleep in peace.

  Lynch sat up, moaned, groaned, and gave his old body a little stretch and a few scratches of the more personal nature. She woke him up, so she had to deal with this side of it. “All right. Since I forgot to change the codes again. What is it? Make it snappy. I got nightmares to have.”

  The look of disgust on Gina’s face sat there below her over-teased blonde hair for only a minute before she attempted to squeeze her fingers into the front pocket of her skin-tight jeans with the knees ripped out of them. Her target was a long roll of something. Lynch wondered what it was for a moment, and then thought it was probably a roll of breath mints, considering her line of work. Bad breath on a hooker just made him queasy. He wasn’t close enough to catch a whiff of her breath, but felt she was very courteous to consider it.

  With a little dance back and forth on her open-toed, six-inch heels, her fingers finally reached her target and pulled out the roll to produce her Scroll. With a simple flip of her wrist, the screen unrolled to its full six-inch length. The screen popped to life, showing flashing colors and alerts of missed calls and messages.

  Lynch asked, “How do you have the latest Scroll before me?”

  “You don’t have one. You didn’t even have one when you were on the force. They gave you one once and you um,… lost it?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” he replied. “I do have one now, though. Needed it for business.”

  Her fingers danced across the screen, flipping through photos. What the various pictures were, Lynch didn’t want to consider. When she found what she was looking for she stopped and shoved the screen in his face.

  A touch of farsightedness forced him to recoil back so his eyes could focus on the image of a pretty blonde. In fact, she was a very pretty girl, too pretty to be one of Gina’s “co-workers”.

  “Who is this?”

  “Sarah Tyson. She is 19.”

  Well, of course she has a name, thought Lynch as he looked up toward Gina for a little more information. Catching a hint was not on what Lynch assumed was a short list of her skills, that only included stitching him up and turning tricks. He prompted her, “And?”

  “Her dad, the tech tycoon, you know, Tyson Tech, the company that makes everything from television to military robotics and units like Totter here, anyway… He has been walking around at night asking around to see if anyone has seen her. She went missing about a week ago.”

  Lynch held up his hand and said, “Let me stop you there. You think I can either take him on as a client, or do something so out of character for me and go out and see if I can find her all on my own, right?”

  Gina nodded.

  “Nope, not going to happen.”

  Gina’s face and body went slack as she sighed her disappointment with Lynch’s response.

  “Let me explain why. I have seen it dozens of times. Rich overbearing father who wants his daughter to act like the perfect little lady from the day she is born ‘til the day she dies. It is great when she is in the ‘dress up like a princess’ phase of her life, but as she gets older and wants to be her own person, not so much. If he pushes back too hard, she strikes out. Usually by showing up in a black leather outfit with black fingernails and hanging around with the wrong crowd. If he keeps it up, he eventually smothers her so much she runs away at the first chance to live her own life. Years later, she shows back up, either married with kids wanting to reunite or, what is most likely, she shocks the family and shows at the reading of her poor dead father’s will.”

  Lynch leaned back against the sofa and crossed his hands behind his head. The smugness he felt had nothing to do with the disappointment painted all over Gina’s face. Well, maybe it had a little to do with it. These types of cases were the bread and butter for private detectives. The business is all based on trust. The more the right people learn they can trust you, the better the cases they approach you about. If you happen to be an ex-cop, that lead time is a little shorter, and that early period is not so much about developing trust that you can do the job, but more about figuring out how much like a cop you still are. Either way, until you are through that period, the only ones that will trust you are the worried parents whose adult child has ran off and have already been pushed away by the police.

  Those cases end in one of four ways. Their child shows up on their own, and you end up arguing with the parents that your search put pressure on them, and they should pay you. You find the child, which i
s kind of a rare outcome. The child’s body is found, and you end up having the uncomfortable conversation with a grieving parent about paying you. The worst of all outcomes is when the child is never found, or the parent gives up, and you don’t get paid.

  “So, not interested,” Lynch concluded.

  Gina appeared to not want to take his conclusion as final and asked, “And why the hell not?”

  She stood and waited for his answer, with her arms crossed and right foot tapped a furious beat on the floor. As light as she was, it sounded like a jackhammer in Lynch’s head. The determination in her eyes told Lynch she would not let this go anytime soon, but she better. It was late, which it really wasn’t, and he was tired. He had no intention of going another round with her on this topic. “Didn’t you hear a word I said?”

  “Come on, Lynch. She could be in real trouble. How many times do I come to you with something like this?”

  That last question was a loaded one that he could have hit right out of the ballpark with an answer of weekly, but he left it alone and attacked the first part.

  “Did her father say anything other than that she went missing? Anything that hinted she was in any sort of trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any information from the street, or anyplace else, of her being in any sort of trouble?”