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Notes Chapter 18: THANK YOU for all previous reviews! I hope you enjoy this chapter, and I hope the last one was okay even though the outcome was maybe not what was expected; there's still plenty of peril to come :D Please continue reviewing - I love to know what you think - welcome at any time, for any chapter, and always replied to if logged.
Thank you to Fat Kat and Juliette for your reviews, and to Blue Shadowdancer and sarramaks for reading.
Lost Letters: Chapter 18
6th August
…Both of us were feeling pretty sick of staring at the same four walls in the apartment, so we took ourselves out to find what we could do for free. There's more than you might think; we had an awesome afternoon in the park and trying on clothes in Bloomies and Saks, clothes we had no intention of buying of course. Though Joe did tell me that when he's made his fortune, the first thing he's going to do is take me out shopping. Believe me, I'm going to hold him to that…
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They were all there, as many as there could be. Still three down though, with Mac still at the hospital, and that was noted in faces bereft of smiles, laughter that died before it began, and chairs that were empty.
Sid sat himself by the door; the best place to observe everyone who entered. Hawkes sat down next to him with a quick, tight nod as the last person in shut the door firmly.
Flack, leaning his weight against the end of the table, looked a pale and lined shadow of himself. Sid stared in concern, seeing instead of the young detective he was used to encountering, a man slowly caving under pressure.
A pressure they all felt. They all knew what had happened at the hospital yesterday, the near miss. Sid could not imagine what Flack was feeling at this point, having had their probable suspect in sight, in snatching distance, only to lose him. But he had not escaped without leaving traces of himself behind. He glanced at Lindsay whose blouse only partially concealed the bandage on her upper arm, and felt his stomach sink at the thought that there had nearly been another empty chair in the room, and another bed in the hospital filled.
Lindsay looked up, smiling quickly at him, and Sid suddenly saw a difference in her. The real Lindsay that had almost died away at the vanishing point of the crime scene, was slowly reviving. He smiled to see her.
Glancing at Detective Angell, who had pulled up a chair at his side, Flack took a stance and faced the room, lacking none of his authority, despite his exhaustion, "Okay, we all know why we're here. For anyone who doesn't, this is where things are at: we had a security breach yesterday at the hospital, where we believe our suspect for the attempted murder of Detective Messer and Detective Bonasera, tried another attack. We now have officers stationed there, and everyone on alert. Needless to state, this case and everything connected to it, is our priority." He spread a deck of files across the table, "What I need you to do is share everything you have on the evidence side, and Detective Angell and I will do the same. Hammerback, you first: the three vics, what's the link?"
Sid angled his elbows on the arms of the chair and laced his fingers together. He felt his glasses slide down his nose as he began, "As you say, three vics, all linked: Jane Doe from the first scene, COD, shot to the forehead; John Doe, the body in the lake, same COD; Ditto our third vic, the John Doe in the car…"
"Who we think is one of the bastards who ran Danny down, and shot and abducted Stella." Flack interposed with a snarl, losing his professional restraint momentarily. A murmur ran round the room.
The interruption gave Sid time for his thoughts to coalesce, "As yet, I've still not been able to determine identity, although Sheldon is working on a facial reconstruction of our third vic. That's about all I can tell you for now." He wished it wasn't.
"Keep at it."
Sid leaned back in his chair and set his mind to the puzzles within and without: three people with no known names, but no less identity, who waited for their naming in the place that gave him his definition. Not long, he had promised them, he would not make them wait long.
Hawkes had more to offer, "I got five matching bullets: three from our vics; the one that hit Stella; and the one we took out of the wall at Trinity yesterday." Along with everyone else, Sid glanced at Lindsay, who kept her eyes fixed on the table and her arms rigid at her side, "Striations match; all from the same gun, .22 calibre, Smith and Wesson revolver."
"And likely the same shooter. Damn." Flack's eyes pulled all of them in, "Damn. I had him. He was right there in front of me, and I let him go. Do you know how much that pisses me off?" There was no answer to give him.
"Flack, it wasn't your…" Hawkes spoke up, but Flack beat the rest of his placation down as his palms smacked onto the table.
"Believe me, I'd like to think that, I really would, but in this case it was my fault, and I'm going to have to deal with that. But until we catch this guy and his associate, I'm not going to waste my time or anyone else's wracking myself with guilt. I screwed up, and I'm going to fix it." Slivers of blue ice looked round, and Flack continued unhindered, "So what else? Aside from bodies and bullets."
A throat cleared, and Adam's voice caused heads to turn his way and almost obscure his words. Sid gave him an encouraging smile, "I, uh, I mean, we have the post office box key that - that Dr Hammerback found in the second vic. I managed to get a partial serial number off of it, and uh, Lindsay and Hawkes and I have narrowed it down to belonging to one of two companies in the city, and one of eight hundred and twenty boxes. Kendall and I are trying to cut the number further, eliminating active boxes."
"Good job." Flack nodded, and passed on to the next person and the evidence they had. Sid watched and listened to it all, and the morning passed into afternoon.
They did not have much beyond the victims, the bullets and the wreck of their team; but the evidence was building, and was beginning to match up and reveal. The partial footprint from the original crime scene matched a partial print from the hospital; the fragments of paper that Adam had found on and around the body in the lake, he had identified as a common brand of writing paper and envelopes; the suspect descriptions from the witnesses at the first scene matched the description Stella's rescuer had given Angell, and Flack was also hoping for a description from Stella herself, if possible; finally they had what the security cameras had caught at the hospital - a sequence of smudged and shadowy escaping images.
Despite what they had though; who and why was still missing.
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"Who do we have, Rich? Give me names and faces, then I want to know why."
They were in a diner in the middle of Manhattan. One of a well-known chain, who specialised in the uniform blandness of their décor, and innocuous and unchallenging menu.
TJ never ate in one too often to be noticed; he exchanged just enough conversation with the staff and left tips that were never too small, never too big, always unremarkable. If asked to describe him, he was certain that any of the waitresses or bus boys would be unable to say more than that he was a white male in a baseball cap, medium height, medium build. No more, no less.
As he impelled Rich towards a high-backed booth at the side of the diner, TJ waited for an answer.
The other man shrank into the corner, and pressed against the hot glass, before he obliged. He gave him the names he already knew; of the two detectives he had failed to kill; and the other two detectives investigating Rita's murder. TJ added the name of the detective they had encountered yesterday at the hospital, whose name he had made it a priority to discover. It had not taken him long: he knew many people, many names, many past misdemeanours.
He ordered fries and sodas and looked out at the passing of the city through the window as he waited. Lives passed by a dust streaked pane. His reflection overlaid the figures that walked past blindly; Rich's was an insubstantial blur.
The order arrived, and TJ worked through it, steadily pronging fries with a fork, and dabbing his mouth with a napkin. Rich sat and picked at his food, before shoving it away.
"Not hungry? Don't like to see good food go to waste, Rich." A small smile played over his lips as his companion gagged and choked down some more food, leaving remains. Remains he would have to dispose of, as always.
Rich had become an impetuous liability. He had caught up with him just in time yesterday, after Troy's tip off. Too messy, too impulsive. Sometimes it paid off; he had been useful in the past, but now TJ was reaping the whirlwind of his actions, and he was not going to be doing so for much longer.
It was up to TJ whether the detectives lived or died: Rich wanted them dead because they had seen him, but that wasn't going to matter for much longer. None of their lives or deaths mattered. What mattered to him was his own life.
The detective with the short crop of hair and the penetratingly blue eyes had become a definite threat. But one or even five fewer detectives in the New York Police Department was not going to trouble him. One death or five deaths, if they drew attention away from himself, then he would make them happen. Rich could take the fall.
Rich's methods would not work this time, not anymore. He left a mess; he left bloodstains and ashes; he left too much of himself. TJ left nothing of himself, his true self. The detective had not seen all there was to see.
TJ straightened his schemes in his mind. Chaos was not the order of the day. To eliminate who he wanted to this time, he needed organisation, traceless methods, clean deaths. He had people he knew, young and vulnerable minds, free from the clutter of thinking, and in many cases conscience. A word here and there and a few handfuls of bills and people would cease to exist. And he had already spoken the words. No mess, no panic, no trace.
Yesterday, Rich had broken all those cardinal rules, forcing him into an undignified and messy flight out of the hospital with nothing accomplished. He looked at him now, spinning his empty soda glass round and round on the surface of the table, smearing an ooze of ketchup. TJ put his hand on top of the grimy bandage around the other man's hand, stopping the movement. No more mess.
"Remember what I told you yesterday, Rich? Keep yourself out of trouble. Now listen up: your associate Troy is about to undertake a second job for me, which leaves me in need of your company tonight. We got ourselves some urgent visiting. And if Troy screws up again, it adds an extra call to our list. Think you can handle that?"
Rich looked at him, and TJ saw death's harvest already in his eyes, "What choice do I got, dude?"
TJ smiled, "Whatever choice you want."
It didn't matter. It would all end the way he chose.
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She had no choice in the matter now, Mrs Adams was worried. It was more than six days since she or anyone in the apartment block, as far as she knew, had seen Rita. Joshua, whose judgement she trusted more than any human, had clinched her concern. He was suffering the girl's absence, and letting her know very clearly with the salvo of wounded glares he shot at her every time he padded up the steps on purposeful paws, and came trailing back down in disappointment. And he was getting thin; chewing his food with exaggerated disdain, before leaving most of it in his dish,
Mrs Adams was worried about him. She was sure a ridge of bone was beginning to make itself felt under his now less than glossy coat.
"Oh, Joshua-boy." She murmured into his fur, running her hands along his back. Hands whose skin had darkened to a deep walnut brown under the sun; that even with their calluses and lines ingrained deeper than bark, were gentle over his older than she liked to admit, body, "Don't you be leaving me any time soon."
The sun shone on and on, reaching its late afternoon zenith and Mrs Adams's nadir of discomfort. Everything prickled and itched in the heat, and she had spent the last hour flat out on her bed, sinking into the lumps and gullies of her old mattress. Joshua dozed at the end of the bed, in the hollow that his weight had made over the years. One paw extended, resting on her foot, and his one eye open a hairline; keeping watch, Mrs Adams liked to think.
Suddenly his eye opened wide, and its burnished depths stared out of the bedroom door; his ragged ear stood to attention and his paws stretched and lifted him upright. In a moment he had leaped silently off the bed and paced to the door.
Mrs Adams was wide awake. Joshua was better than any guard-dog. There was a sound in her apartment, the sound of an intruder, she was certain. It was not Rita's step, the only other person who had a key and a legitimate right to be there. She rolled off the bed, and motioned for Joshua to stay behind her. From the side of her bed, she picked up the stave of wood she kept there, and had always kept without needing to use it. The one time she had, the burglary six days ago, it had been uselessly out of reach. She did not want to use it, but she was prepared to.
Silently, she tiptoed into the sitting room, and saw a young man with his back to her. She recognised him instantly as the same that had previously invaded her home. He had not seen her, being too busy forcing open closets and boxes; rifling through her private papers and secrets, trampling over her letters.
Anger overtook her, and she brought the piece of wood cracking down onto the back of his head. He dropped to the floor with a groan, and a thin dribble of blood appeared through his spikes of blonde hair.
Mrs Adams gasped, and the weapon dropped to her side; she had done it, she had hurt someone; she was responsible for shedding the blood of another person…
Someone who would have hurt her, and Joshua. Someone who had held a knife out in threat to her last time; who would have shed her blood with no compunction. Now she had committed violence herself, but knew she would do it again, if she and those she loved were threatened. That knowledge exhilarated and terrified her.
With the toe of her ancient slipper, Mrs Adams prodded the boy who did not move, only groaned again, "Thought you'd come in here again and get the better of an old lady and her old cat did you boy? Thought you'd picked an easy target, huh? Well, that ain't the case. Now see how you like it!"
She skittered into the kitchen, heart pounding, and tore open drawers until she found a coil of electrical flex. It took only moments to bind his hands and feet as tightly as she could, and then she dialled for help. It took only minutes for blue and red lights to flash and dazzle down through her window.
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The sunset had melted through the window a few hours ago. It was an improvement on the first room Stella had woken to; a room which had contained no more to see than the walls she was trapped within; no windows and only a door she could not get out of.
They had moved her the day before, following the incident that neither Mac or Flack had yet told her the full story of. It was not much of an improvement on her situation though: she could still not get out of the room herself, or the bed. Nor could she even move much without her breath getting lodged somewhere inside her chest and hurting her, and the hot ache in her side starting to rage and throb.
She had woken an hour or so ago from a nightmare of windows. Buildings covered in blank eyes, graphite glassed and opaque, watching her, trapping her. Then they had changed into real eyes, the same that felt like they had bitten into her, the last thing she had seen before her memory stalled.
Bits and pieces were starting to return to her though; she held them tightly, waiting for the rest to come back. Mac held some of them too and she knew that he would tell her; but other people held the rest, and she did not know if she would ever have them returned.
Time, memory, control. All of it taken from her, to torment her, and there was very little at the moment she could wrest back. Stella pushed herself to sit up as much she could manage, suppressing a hiss of pain, then she leaned back on the pillows that were too soft, and took a few moments to retrieve her breath; counting one for every flower head in the vase of dahlias Sid had given her, their softness of beaten gold stiffened to black card in the dark. The window at least had given her day and night back.
Mac, an anthracite outline in the twilight of the room, was still sleeping, her movement had not disturbed him. His presence in the room she both welcomed and resented; not him, not Mac himself, but that he was there, choosing to sleep at the wrong hours in a chair she knew was uncomfortable. And she hated that he felt he needed to be responsible for her. Stella took responsibility for herself, she did not want anyone else to do so, but in the last few days, she had lost that choice. She was reliant on others, and that hurt most.
Other than Mac, who she trusted implicitly, there were very few people she would voluntarily entrust with her life; but in this situation, she was forced to extend her trust to and put blind, unquestioning faith in every person who walked into the room.
Most of them, she did not even know their names.
The night crept under her eyelids and she slipped into a half-sleep, waking again in the half-light of morning as the door opened and a very young, very nervous member of staff entered holding a paper cup of more medication. Stella took it from her without question.
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Danny's father did not trust doctors, or many other people. He asked questions, he argued, he demanded second opinions. But he was asleep as the door opened and another member of the medical staff who came in and out almost every hour, entered with hesitant steps.
Danny's mother smiled blankly at the young woman as she adjusted the IV line in her son's arm, and then left as silently as she had arrived. Nothing changed, not at first, but then as her eyes were closing and her head was toppling onto her husband's shoulder a thin, horrible line of sound jerked them both awake. She saw what made the sound. She heard herself shouting, screaming, as the room suddenly filled with people.
"Danny? Danny! No! No! Not my baby! Danny…"
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Please review and let me know what you think, good or bad. All thoughts and suggestions welcome! Thank you, Lily x