Seventeen
We were all sitting having Regina’s homemade meatloaf when Detective Hefron and Detective Moore walked into the room, followed by another man.
I watched Sam sit up in his bed and swing his legs over the side.
He would have gotten up, but the man walked between the two detectives and put up his hand to stop him.
When he was close enough, he extended his hand for Sam to take.
“Wow.” Sam chuckled, clasping the hand tight and gripping the other man’s shoulder. “Big gun.”
The other man nodded, the edge of his lip curling just slightly as he looked at him. “Enough’s enough, Sam. We are looking at a serial killer, after all.”
Sam nodded before the man let go and turned to the rest of us. His pale blue eyes roamed over us all before they settled on me.
“Jory Harcourt.”
“Yeah.”
He squinted at me. “Why’re you wearing a coat inside?”
“’Cause I’m cold,” I answered as the reason for my peacoat.
It seemed like I was freezing all the time.
Ever since Caleb and I had found Joyce Fain dead, I couldn’t get warm enough.
Aja said it was psychological and not physiological, but I’d dismissed her rationale.
And yes, usually Sam was home to hold me and sleep with me and imprint on my mind and body so that everything else disappeared…
but I was sure I was really, actually cold.
Neither she nor Dane were buying it, however.
“Hospitals are always cold,” the man assured me.
“Who are you?” I asked irritably.
He walked over to me and extended his hand as I stood up. “Special Agent Zane Calhoun from the field office in Dallas. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Special agent?”
He moved his badge from where it had fallen behind his tie.
The letters were big and visible. “FBI. We’re helping the Chicago PD with the investigation, as you know, and I’ve been called in from Dallas since that’s Mr. Reid’s hometown.
We need to get him into custody as soon as possible before he hurts anyone else or endangers you, your brother, or Detective Kage again. ”
“But how can you be sure that—”
“That what? That Mr. Reid is a murderer?”
“Yes,” Dane answered.
He turned and looked at Dane. “Dane Harcourt?”
“Yes.”
He walked around the table and shook Dane’s hand before taking the time to introduce himself to first Aja and then Sam’s parents.
When his eyes flicked back to Dane’s, I saw him smile.
“I can tell you, Mr. Harcourt, that we have seized hundreds of photographs of you from Mr. Reid’s home.
His mother has verified that he knew who you were almost six months before he approached Mr. Harcourt at—”
“It’s gonna get confusing,” I said, cutting him off even though he wasn’t talking to me. “Just call me Jory.”
His eyes were back on mine, and I saw how he was studying me. “All right, then. Jory it is.”
“So you’re saying Caleb was around for months before he let either Jory or me know who he was,” Dane said to clarify Agent Calhoun’s earlier statement.
“Yessir, that’s what I’m saying. At his home in Fort Worth, we found a crawl space in the floor where we recovered a knife.
I’m confident that it will be a match to the one that was used on all the victims. We found a gun in the back of Ms. Fain’s car that, again, I’m confident will be a match for the bullet in Greg Fain’s head. ”
I just stared at him as he turned and looked at me.
“There was a box of college memorabilia in Greg Fain’s storage locker in Hyde Park that I’m guessing Mr. Reid didn’t know about, and I’m also guessing Mr. Fain was using it as an insurance policy.
No doubt he never got to deliver the threat to Mr. Reid, as he killed him before he got the chance. ”
“Why did he…”
“Kill Mr. Fain?”
“Yeah.”
“My guess is that Mr. Fain was highly agitated when he found out about Detective Kage’s involvement. Greg Fain had been arrested for selling marijuana to minors five years prior, and on that arrest record Dominic Kairov and Sam Kage are cited as the arresting officers.”
“Really? When I was working vice?” Sam said.
Agent Calhoun nodded.
“I don’t remember him,” Sam said quietly, and Agent Calhoun turned to look at him.
“You can’t remember them all, Sam, and my guess is that it’s not as bad as it sounds.
When I pulled up the report, Greg Fain was twenty-two at the time of his arrest, and the guys he sold the pot to were his friends, ages seventeen to nineteen.
I’m guessin’ maybe you and Dom scared the crap out of him then, and when he found out you were involved, the same detective that busted him the only other time he had ever had a run-in with the law…
he lost it. No way for Mr. Reid to calm him down, so he did what he felt he had to do and killed him. ”
“This doesn’t seem too easy to you?” I asked him.
“Easy?” Agent Calhoun gave me a look. “It only seems easy because it’s so clear.
Detective Kage had a hunch, and it was the right one.
The box in Greg Fain’s storage locker had photos of him and Mr. Reid from when they went to Texas A&M together.
Only Mr. Reid graduated, but they must have kept in touch over the years.
Maybe when Mr. Reid came here to see Mr. Harcourt, he looked up his old friend and put the idea into his head about kidnapping you to get your brother to pay the ransom. ”
“I remember Caleb being so surprised that Dane was going to pay a ransom for him as well as me.”
“But see, it made no sense that Mr. Reid was kidnapped, and when Detective Kage called me and asked that I stay involved even after both you and Mr. Reid had been recovered…we both felt that it had to be an inside job.”
I nodded. “Who did you think it was?”
He sighed quickly. “I thought it was you, Jory.”
“Me? But I was kidnapped and—”
“But you got away, and the way you did that, that whole story about car thieves and being left…that sounded odd to me.”
“But—”
He put his hand up to still me. “But then Detective Kage was injured, and what you did after that… I knew you were innocent even before you started running around town looking for answers. Finding the two boys that stole the car, finding the house where you were kept, even finding Joyce Fain… It was nice work, and you did it all to keep Detective Kage safe.”
I just looked him in the eye. “Why would Caleb want to hurt Dane?”
“The profile we did for Caleb Reid gives us insight into the mind of a classic psychopath. He wants what he wants, and he has no remorse or even any emotion at all in his quest to fulfill his own needs.”
“What does he want?”
“Well, first, he wants his family to be whole, and with you gone, Jory, the only siblings Dane Harcourt has are the Reids. Second, he wants money, plain and simple. He sees his brother’s wealth, sees the woman he married, the lifestyle he leads, and he wants it for himself.
Money as a motivator is powerful, and everybody gets that.
With you dead and Mr. Harcourt grieving, Mr. Reid can ingratiate himself and bring his brother back into the fold. ”
“Never happen,” Dane told him.
“Of course not,” Agent Calhoun assured him. “But it’s not my fantasy, it’s his.”
I shook my head. “I still—”
“Caleb Reid killed the first victim right after he met you, Jory. After he met you, saw you and Dane interact. Didn’t he even tell you he’d watched you together?”
“I—yeah. He did. He said that he knew Dane liked me a lot and that I could sort of be the bridge between them.”
“Yes. Exactly. But in reality, he was seething. When he killed that kid, he wrote your name on the wall in your old apartment in blood and fecal matter, and under your name he wrote the word ‘fake.’”
I shivered hard and looked over at Sam. He’d never told me that part.
“Come here.” He gestured me close.
I moved to his side, and he tucked my head under his chin, rubbing his hand up and down my arm.
“I think fake means fake brother, and that was the piece that was missing all this time,” Sam explained. “It all makes sense now.”
I nodded slowly.
“The next victim was taken after Mr. Harcourt legally made you his brother,” Agent Calhoun continued. “I’m sure that nearly killed Mr. Reid. Then the—”
“I heard all this when agents Wright and Bingham did the profile on the killer. They told us why he was mad, but now you’re saying all that rage was Caleb’s?”
“Yes.”
“That makes no—”
“In Caleb Reid’s mind, you’re the one that caused him and his family to be guests in his brother’s life. Without you, Jory, the Reids could be a family again.”
“I—”
“The worst, of course, had to be the wedding, which is why the last victim was—”
“No,” Sam barked at him.
Special Agent Calhoun took a breath. “I’m sorry.
We’re just so close to bringing this man to justice and…
You have to understand that to Mr. Reid, all these instances filled him with such incredible rage that it could only be vented through murder.
” He finished, and I realized how clinical he sounded.
“You know, Caleb isn’t some case study, Agent Calhoun, he’s a human being.”
“Barely,” Calhoun stated. “Jory, I can’t think of any reason for you still being alive beyond the fact that he must genuinely like you. There’s no other explanation for it.”
I shifted away from Sam, but not beyond his reach. “So what now?”
“Now Caleb Reid needs to be found and taken into custody and put under psychiatric care as quickly as possible. Until he’s apprehended, you and Detective Kage, and Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt, and everyone else are in terrible jeopardy.
Let’s not forget that Caleb Reid put a bomb in Detective Kage’s car that nearly killed him. ”
And I had been missing all the rest, dismissing everything that had ever been done to me because I was fine, but Sam… Caleb had tried to kill Sam. I turned and looked at him and felt my eyes get hot.
“Oh shit,” Sam grumbled, glaring at Calhoun. “Could ya lay the fuck off, Zane? Don’t be such a fuckin’ hard-ass when you’re talking to Jory.”