Chapter 3 #2
Except that wasn’t the case at all, was it. He’d defied a direct order. He could have been arrested for treason. Instead the other major, the one who wasn’t even his CO, had bailed him out for no other reason than it had been unfair, and now he was here where he didn’t know anything.
He’d thought he knew things—his FLETC training had gone fine, but that thing they’d just done—where they reasoned through a mass of facts and found a suspect, then decided how best to investigate him—that was new to him.
He’d asked questions because it was interesting, not because he’d realized he was a weak spot on the team.
And he’d met Crosby. Big dumb Irish flatfoot who was probably right, his being there had been a big mistake. Except that big dumb Irish flatfoot apparently knew more than Joey fucking Carlyle, because he was already coming in here on his own time, making up for what he realized he didn’t know.
And Carlyle, who thought he was hot shit, had just realized that he didn’t know shit instead.
Oh fuck. He needed to up his game.
And that started with not being jealous or mean about the big dumb Irish flatfoot.
“What kinds of online classes?” he asked, and he must have been abrupt about it, because both Chadwick and Harding got the sort of expressions on their faces when a kid did something oh so precocious.
“I’ll get you a catalogue,” Chadwick said mildly. “There’s time. Any other questions?”
“What should I wear tomorrow?” he asked.
“Black tracksuit is fine,” Harding said, glancing at the new outfit Joey had worn that morning. “In fact, it almost looks more professional than a sport suit and tie.”
“Fuck you very much,” Chadwick said with a grimace. “If they had a Grim Reaper outfit, I’m sure that would suit me better.”
Harding chuckled, and Carlyle realized that these two men had known each other for a while.
Unlike with Crosby—or that Kathy person who still pissed him off because he’d heard Chadwick’s voice warm—Carlyle didn’t feel any jealousy or one-upmanship with Harding over Chadwick.
Maybe it was because the two of them together had done that sweet thing with the food and the making sure he didn’t wake up in a strange place alone.
Or maybe it was because Harding was so overwhelmingly his CO.
But either way, Harding had orders or lessons or suggestions.
Chadwick seemed to have more than that.
Carlyle didn’t understand the hold, but he did understand he needed to trust his instincts. Whatever fascination he had with this very smart deer, he needed to observe the deer and maybe learn from his behaviors if he wanted to keep this job.
ALL THAT self-searching and he almost let some other hunter kill his fucking deer!
“Nice digs,” Joey said as he and Chadwick disembarked from the department-issued SUV.
The place backed up against the national forest that housed the Pine Barrens and, thanks to the thick growth of oak and pine that made up the place’s name, was out of sight from its nearest neighbors.
It stood two stories, both levels having big bay windows that looked to the road and an overhanging awning that would keep the porches shady in the summer and rain and snow free during the other times of year.
There was an attached garage and no outside stairs, so they approached the front door with its nice little stoop and a solidly built mat with bristles at the bottom designed to really clean the sole of a boot.
“God forbid we track the forest in,” Chadwick muttered.
Joey cocked his head, listening for those mutters. They’d spoken a little on the two-hour drive from Manhattan. Chadwick had asked him about his interests—movies, TV, music—and Joey had been… embarrassed.
“I don’t… listen, a lot,” he said, thinking about the noise of these things. “I… if you can’t hear the silence around you, you could be in danger.”
Gideon frowned. “But if you don’t hear the music around you, you could miss out on a lot of joy,” he said, concerned. “C’mon, Carlyle—it’s not neuroscience. What makes you happy?”
Gah! Joey racked his brains. During deployment, he’d wandered environs, watching the small victories and tragedies of flora and fauna around his seemingly oblivious unit.
“Snakes and birds?” he said. “Monkeys.” He paused. “Did you know the Spider Monkey is endangered because of habitat loss?” He sighed. “And it doesn’t get laid enough. But it has a prehensile tail. Not a lot of the New World Monkeys do.”
Chadwick appeared bemused. “I did not know that,” he said, as though assimilating that very fact.
“That is sad—but very cool. Tell you what.” He fiddled with the radio for a minute.
“I’m going to play some Imagine Dragons, because they’re old school, but you might have heard them, and you tell me about New World Monkeys, because I am seriously fascinated. ”
At first Joey thought that would be too much noise, but Chadwick seemed to have a knack for picking just the right amount of noise for the occasion.
The music was loud enough so, when Joey ran out of things to say about monkeys, a song called “Radioactive” that Joey remembered from grade school was playing, and he could hear enough for it to be familiar.
“Oh,” he said in surprise.
“What?” Chadwick asked.
“I know this song.” He hummed a few bars. “I like it.”
And then, for the first time, he saw a truly joyous smile break out on Chadwick’s face. “Awesome,” he said. “Next stop, Broadway!”
Joey frowned. “Broadway? Like… I don’t know. Plays?”
“Broadway like musical theater!” Gideon almost crowed. “I’ve got tickets to see Wicked tonight. I’m stoked. I know it’s not your thing, but give it some time in the car, you and me, and it will be.”
Joey had snorted, but now, as they neared the suddenly foreboding and very expensive house, he heard Chadwick humming something under his breath.
I wonder if that’s from his musical?
Joey got it then. He thought about creatures to calm himself down. Stalking mountain lions, protective wolves, swift and muscular deer. The poor doomed Spider Monkey with its rare-for-South America prehensile tail.
Chadwick heard music.
He was interested in mine. He wants me to be interested in his.
Oh. Was this part of the new job? Being interested in the people around him?
Joey got being interested in protecting people, or serving people, or avoiding people, or sometimes killing people, all in the name of making the ecosystem work. He understood ecosystems. His grandfather had taught him well about the predators not overhunting, about the prey needing to be culled.
But while he’d been glad to let pregnant does or young, untried stags pass unhunted in the name of keeping the ecosystem sound, he hadn’t wanted to share musical tastes with them.
The same went for bedmates—his personal ecosystem enjoyed the physical contact, but he was content to make the kill, as it were, and then fade from their existence, a one-off in the night.
Joey realized that if he was partnered with this man, he needed to not fade from his existence. They needed to be real to each other.
Joey was starting to see he had a lot of weaknesses, and it didn’t please him at all.
Chadwick was talking to himself, which brought Joey back to the here and now.
“So what do we have here, Mr. Boring White Guy,” Chadwick murmured as they neared the house. “Could be a stockbroker, could be a monster. Until we open the door, it’s both. Schrodinger’s monster.” He chuckled to himself then as they neared the door, and Joey found his lips twitching.
Out of nowhere, he longed for Chadwick to turn to him, that self-deprecating smirk on his lips, and invite Joey in on the joke.
Joey actually got the Schrodinger’s cat jokes.
He got the dry, subtle digs at his own age.
Joey had never really gotten another human being before, and except for the thing with American musical theater, Joey was starting to think he could get Chadwick.
He couldn’t fuck Chadwick—for one thing, Chadwick apparently had game that nobody had suspected.
Joey knew for sure that Kathy Novocek woman who had sent him the files on Chester Schumer had been angling for an invitation to Gideon Chadwick’s bed for the last two days.
Joey could practically smell her pheromones through the phone, not that Chadwick responded to any of that noise.
But Joey had to leave the man alone that way. This thing they were doing—tracking prey together—they couldn’t contaminate that with any other smells.
Still, they were what? At the den of a fluffy bunny today? Joey had seen the boards, had even bought into the reasoning, but he couldn’t get over that mild, deer-in-the-headlights expression of the puffy-faced man with the white-blond hair and big wet blue eyes.
“Remember,” Chadwick said as they neared the door, “you have to go to the bathroom.”
Joey grunted, clearly recalling the distraction method they’d talked about on the ride over—in between discussions of Wicked and whether or not jaguars should be classified as endangered because their population was dropping.
Chadwick would establish rapport, and then Joey would ask politely to use the bathroom. Doing so while Chadwick engaged would give Joey a chance to scope out the place. Joey figured that finding traces of things that shouldn’t be there was something he could absolutely do.
The door opened, not forebodingly at all.
“Chester Schumer?” Chadwick said, smiling pleasantly. The expression made the back of Joey’s neck tighten. “Hello, we’re from the SCTF. My colleagues and I are doing a canvass of people from your firm for some extra information on some of your clients. Do you mind if I come in?”
“We can’t do this out here?” Schumer asked, and while he kept a pleasant smile on his own face, it was the same smile Chadwick was showing.
Joey knew his assignment. Tightening his glutes and affecting an impatient bob and weave, he gave his best look of apology. “I’m sorry, man. I’ve really gotta hit the head. We’re so far away from a gas station, my only other option’s behind a tree, you know what I mean?”
“Besides,” Chadwick told him, giving a nod to Joey, “I’ll be recording your answers so my colleagues and I can compile a timeline with what they get from their interviews, and the breeze out here”—it was something, actually; there was a storm brewing this early April day—“will play havoc with the sound.”
Schumer scowled. “You’re interviewing everybody?” he said, as Joey gave an impatient little bob.
“Yessir,” Chadwick said. “It’s standard procedure.
Your coworkers will report the same thing.
” And oh, hadn’t Chadwick been smart about that.
Joey had thought it was a stupid precaution, doing all the interviews at the same time, but immediately their boy’s shoulders relaxed, and Schumer seemed to relent.
“I did not know that,” he said with dignity.
He had a good voice, Joey thought. Joey had expected it to be high and squeaky, but it was low and cultured and mellifluous.
Schumer probably got lots of people to trust him as a stockbroker on his voice alone, but Joey’s entire alert system was suddenly on high.
The back of his neck, his thighs—his sphincter was so tight he’d be squirting diamonds for a week.
Chadwick didn’t wait for the rest of the invitation. He took a step forward and Schumer gave way. Joey followed him into a cavernous foyer with a staircase to the right and what seemed to be a sitting room to the left.
“I hate to impose,” Joey began, and Schumer gave him a disgusted look and gestured curtly up the staircase.
“Top of the landing, third door to the right.”
“Cannot thank you enough,” Joey said and practically hurtled up the stairs.
For one thing, he really did have to pee, but he made short work of that and took his time flushing and running water afterward. While the water ran, he put on gloves and gave the three closed doors in the hallway a try.
The locked one got his immediate attention.
For one thing, it was back-to-back with the bathroom in a way that indicated it also had plumbing. For another, while the other two doors hid a master suite and a guest bedroom and opened easily, showing off rooms done in cream, beige, and ecru, with wood accents, this one was, well, locked.
And while part of Joey wanted to toss Schumer’s bedroom and look to see if there was anything in the drawers, Joey had never been one to let a locked door keep him out.
He kept his lockpicks with him always. He’d mentioned to Gail Pearson, who had helped him check out his weapons and tactical gear, that he had a set, and she told him to consider them like a drop piece or an extra knife, so he didn’t mention the 3-inch Schrade blade tucked against his back or the .
38 Berretta in his ankle holster either.
Now the picks fit against his fingertips like they’d been missing all along, and he did that carefully orchestrated fiddling dance, thinking, “How long can I wash my—”
Plink. And he was in.
He swung the door open, expecting to do a quick assessment of a dark room or a closet, and then he gasped.
The SCTF had an up-to-date situation room, in which everybody had iPads hooked up to a projection screen, and a “murder board” or bullet-point list of the team’s reasoning could be called up on a moment’s notice.
There were even, in the background, whiteboards, and Joey was sure that they’d gotten hard use before electronics had come along to render them obsolete.
This place had whiteboards, with the victims’ pictures mounted on them, almost like a legitimate murder board, because these were pictures of bodies.
And Joey’s blood ran cold as he scanned each picture, because he knew that his entire doubt about this case had stemmed from the fact that the police hadn’t seen a single drop of blood.
And according to the 8x10 glossies affixed to the whiteboards with magnets, there had been considerable blood—all of it from a small wound at the base of the jugular.
A narrow knife? A stiletto? Oh my God. Oh my God. The pale balding man with the big wet eyes and the baritone voice was exactly what Harding and Chadwick had pegged him as and….
And Joey had left his partner downstairs with a serial killer.
Oh God. Chadwick, with his love of musical theater, who had slept on his couch and made sure he’d landed in his apartment and had set aside this case to make sure Joey had been welcomed to the unit as a whole and….
Joey left the water running in the bathroom and the door open to the murder room and bolted down the stairs.
To his horror, he could hear his own footsteps above the beating of his heart.