Chapter 4
Teething
GIDEON’S BACK had been up before Schumer had even opened the door.
He knew for a fact nobody else was being recorded.
Harding and Denison would be taking notes on their phones.
Gail and Crosby—who had both given up their other plans that weekend to canvass employees when they learned what was up, as had Kylie, who was on overwatch instead of Crosby—were doing the same thing.
Gideon wanted a direct line to overwatch while they were in that house.
There was something in the air. Gideon wasn’t sure if Carlyle could feel it, but for Gideon it was almost like a smell, rancid like meat that had just gone bad in an ice chest, and Gideon wanted to stick his nose in the air and peel his lips from his teeth and scent the wind.
Instead, he watched as Carlyle disappeared up the stairs, and while Gideon wondered what he’d find up there, he kept his eyes very firmly fixed on Schumer.
“Can I interest you in a drink?” the man was saying as they entered the sitting room. A wet bar stood in the corner, white marble, ebony cupboards, gray tile. It was almost as unsettling as the gray rug on the gray tile on the floor—absolutely monochromatic.
Gideon wondered if the guy had, like, a thing about color, any color whatsoever. Even the stairs had been a black wrought-iron railing against a white marble staircase. No runner.
Ye gods.
“No, thank you,” Gideon replied to the drink offer. For one thing, it was only 11:00 a.m., but for another? Even if he’d been dying of thirst, nothing in this place made Gideon want to accept any offers of hospitality.
“Do you mind if I get one for myself?” Schumer asked. “Tonic water and lime. I like the bitterness.”
“Knock yourself out,” Gideon replied, not able to suppress a shudder. Soda, yes. Selzer water, fine. But quinine in the morning? Blech.
And while part of him wanted to take this opportunity while Schumer was busy to glance around the house, part of him—the animal part—didn’t want to think of turning his back.
Schumer busied himself behind the bar, and Gideon, still standing, started small talk.
It wasn’t his favorite; the conversation he’d had with Joey about Spider Monkeys and Wicked had been much more satisfying, because in spite of Carlyle’s short responses, the kid (must think of him as a kid, because otherwise, damn, those cheekbones!) had been thoughtful.
Not always funny and not always kind. But thoughtful.
Gideon rather hoped the team was growing on him. He’d certainly been impressed that Crosby, Pearson, and Kylie had volunteered to work this canvass on their off day, the better to keep Schumer from thinking they were on to him.
“So,” Schumer said, pulling Gideon’s attention sharply back to the present. “you guys don’t have anything better to do on a Saturday?”
Gideon snorted. “Oh, we do. Theater tickets, sports events. One of us even knows New York’s hottest DJ. We’re a rockin’ bunch.”
“But you made this a priority.” His voice was flat—not questioning—and Gideon’s hackles actually ruffled.
“A friend of mine called,” Gideon said, shrugging. “She’d been putting pieces together on her own. My unit thought she’d earned some help.”
“And how is dear Kathy doing?” Schumer asked.
Gideon was alert to the danger now, keeping his eyes on Schumer’s hands.
Not Schumer’s face, because that bland, all-purpose smile hadn’t shifted once since they’d started talking, and neither had that ripe baritone.
A true sociopath wouldn’t give anything away in his voice or his face; he didn’t feel enough to let it show.
It was his hands that would be busying themselves, and while Gideon could see that Schumer was cutting a lime up and putting it in a glass bowl, he could also see the occasional little twitch or quiver that said he wanted to go for something but was too conscious of Gideon’s regard.
“You know Kathy?” Gideon asked, and there. Schumer had palmed something as he’d bent to put the limes in the refrigerator.
“She’s been around the office,” Schumer said offhandedly, coming out from behind the bar. He’d left the drink, fully made, on the counter of the bar, and Gideon almost missed what happened next from checking.
“Oh yeah? What fo—oh fuck!”
Schumer rushed him, rounded shoulders down, a stiletto held in his left hand, the same hand he’d used to cut the limes. Gideon might have been gutted by that thing—long, thin, sharp—if he’d been caught unawares.
As it was, he squared to meet his opponent, waited until Schumer was almost upon him, then stepped smoothly aside and seized Schumer’s wrist, pinching hard at the ulnar nerve, between the thumb and the forefinger.
Schumer moaned and sagged, releasing the stiletto, but just as Gideon caught it, the guy rallied, pushing up and surging against Gideon’s chest.
Gideon fell backward over the coffee table, and it shattered under this weight, but he didn’t let go of the stiletto. Instead he held it front and center, and Schumer fell on it, throat first.
Gideon scrambled out from under the gush of blood and the fleshy body, not minding the glass, although he could feel the cuts in his hands, his elbows, fuck, his ass, and knowing he needed to answer Kylie’s urgent summons from the phone in his pocket before she sent in the Marines.
“Chadwick!” Joey called, surprising Gideon into glancing up from Schumer’s still-thrashing body. He should try to staunch the bleeding, but, oh, hey, open wounds! That would be a bad idea.
“Chadwick!” Joey repeated, rounding the staircase and hitting the foyer before rushing into the sitting room. “He’s got a kill room! I thought this guy was a stockbroker.”
“So did I,” Gideon said, straightening his tie with a bloodied hand and then reaching for his phone. “And then he went to get himself a drink at the bar and tried to rush me with a stiletto.”
Joey gaped at him, and Gideon felt a little bit of disgruntled pride kicking in.
“Did you get pictures of the kill board? Harding’s going to want those so we can justify this fucking corpse on the floor.”
Joey had scowled at the man, whose hands had flailed in his own blood as it had pooled underneath him. “Nice job,” he grunted.
“Thank you,” Gideon said, feeling better about the whole thing. “My special forces commander taught an entire class on how to use an attacker’s weapons against him. I was sort of hoping for a cheese knife, because I always thought that would be cool!”
Joey’s cackle surprised them both. “That was good,” he said in surprise. “Next time you have thoughts on Schrodinger’s cat, you should let me in on the joke.”
Gideon grinned at him and reached into his pocket to put Kylie out of her misery. “You want to come with me to see Wicked tonight?” he asked. “It was gonna be Kathy Novacek, but she’s going to be up to her eyeballs in paperwork.”
“Yeah, sure.” Carlyle checked out the body again, shaking his head. “A stiletto. Yeah. Well, wait until you see the wounds on the other guys. It’s his favorite toy.”
Gideon stared at the now-cooling body of what had once been Chester Schumer, and resisted the urge to kick the rat bastard in the gut.
“Not anymore,” he said grimly. Then, “Kylie, my dear, you need to get a bus out here—coroner’s, not for me—and tell Clint to save the interviews for the Feebies, but we need dogs out here, and searchers and—”
Carlyle was flagging him down.
“What?” he asked.
“A murder room,” Carlyle told him, like he was expecting Gideon to remember what he’d been saying as Gideon had been brushing glass out of his hands. “He documented where he buried all his bodies.”
“Gid?” Kylie said over the phone.
“Well, we’ll need all those same people, sweetheart, but their job is going to be a lot easier than you thought.”
“Chadwick, you’re bleeding,” Carlyle said, his voice hitching. “Holy shit. I’m partnered one day and you almost die on me. Do you realize what would happen?”
Gideon gave him a dry glance and grimaced because his cuts were starting to drip and he was contaminating the scene. “I’d miss Wicked?”
“I’d get fired, you asshole! Why didn’t you call for help?”
“Because my special forces commander would take a flight from the fucking desert in California and kill me twice if I had to call for help over this piece of shit and his pigsticker. Jesus, Carlyle, chill out and go take pictures of the murder room. But don’t touch anything. I’m fine.”
HE WAS not, Harding told him grimly one hour later, fine. “Get on the bus, get stitched up, then go home, grab your date, and see your musical—”
“Carlyle’s coming with me. Kathy’s stuck here.”
“You bet I am!” she shouted across the room, where she and her unit had set up an op center using the intel that Schumer himself had left them. “Thanks for the help, Gid—you couldn’t have interviewed this guy on Monday? I was looking forward to tonight.”
“Sorry, Kathy,” Gideon muttered. She was pretty—compact, blond, a fresh girl-next-door face.
He might have gotten laid, he thought irritably.
Now that they no longer worked in the same department, Kathy had seemed more than amenable to his textbook three moves: self-deprecation, casual kindness, and—his best—“Hey, staying friends is my strongpoint.” Gideon had a lot of casually kind friends, but few long-term lovers.
His passion just seemed to revolve around other things.
Kathy’s did too, which had made the idea seem perfect, but Gideon found he was actually more excited about taking Carlyle and popping his theater cherry.
Carlyle didn’t smile much—Gideon wanted to see if he’d be as excited about flying monkeys on stage as he was about Spider Monkeys in the jungle.