Chapter Six
Kane
“Will someone turn off that incessant fucking beeping?” I yelled out, surprised at the gravel to my voice.
“There he is,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say before a face I’d never seen before hovered over mine. “Welcome back, Detective Garrick.”
“Where am I?” I asked, my eyes darting around the room to try and make sense of where I could be and why I felt like I was floating.
“You’re in East Wendell Hospital,” she said, smiling down at me. “You’ve been out for a few days, but it seems your body is recovering well.”
I tried to remember the last thing that happened or why I was in here, but everything was coming up blank.
“What do you have me on?” I asked her.
“Morphine,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’re safe. You needed to be dosed due to your injuries.”
“What injuries?” I grunted. “What the fuck happened?”
“Hey now,” I heard a familiar voice boom from the doorway. I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming next. “Don’t be turning your old, grumpy ass on the innocent nurse.”
The nurse, who’s name was Grace, if I was reading her name tag right, helped me to sit up. I still couldn’t feel my legs or my arms, or anything really as I looked over at the one person who had been with me through thick and thin.
My best friend.
The one who I rarely spoke to anymore.
“Kemp,” I greeted him as he moved into the room. “It’s been a long time for a reason. What are you doing here?”
“That’s no way to greet your oldest friend, now is it?” he replied with a shit eating grin on his face. “How did you get yourself into this mess?”
“Avoiding the question, I see.”
“It’s not my fault,” he said, pulling the chair from the side of the room and dragging it over to the side of the bed. “They called me.”
“Who?”
My head was starting to pound with the sounds of the hospital and chatter outside.
“The doctors, I guess,” he shrugged. “You still have Mimi listed as your next of kin.”
Shit.
“She could have just ignored it,” I said, trying hard not to remember the betrayal that led to me not speaking to my friend. “She is my ex-wife after all.”
“That’s just not Mimi and you know it,” Kemp replied.
“Well you can report back to her and tell her not to worry, I’m fine.”
“You look fine,” he said, sarcastically. “I should have known a fire wouldn't bring down the unstoppable Kane Garrick.”
Fire?
Sparks of memory flooded back, coupled with a crippling headache of Maurelle, what we did on the spider web board she had tied me to, and how good it had felt, how it felt to have her all but confirm she would kill me.
Then the fiery flames licking at my skin before I passed out.
“Seriously, Kemp, just leave, I’m good.”
He stood up, his smile gone. “We still care about you.”
“You certainly didn’t think that when you moved in with my ex-wife,” I said. “I’ll have her name removed from my next of kin tomorrow.”
“You can’t go through life alone, Kane. You know where we are when you need us.”
I didn’t respond, watching as he left the room, downtrodden. I felt remorseful as I watched his shadow leave my sight and I was plunged into the loneliness of the room. The beeping was still driving me crazy, but I was able to tune it out when I focused enough.
Maurelle’s vision haunted me as I closed my eyes. She’d gotten away and had almost taken me out.
I’d fucked up, royally.
Grace popped her head in the room again with a beaming smile that made it hard to hate the intrusion.
“You hungry, Detective Garrick?” she asked me.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind some food.”
She grabbed a tray from the trolley she’d been wheeling around and brought it over to the table, wheeling a tray holder over to sit over the bed. She placed the tray down and helped to unpeel the foil from the top of the bowl and subsequent jello tub.
“Press the button on the side of the bed to call if you need anything,” she said with a bounce in her step as she left me alone. My hands felt numb, but I was able to move them so I could pick up the plastic fork to eat the jello. My throat was sore as the cool jelly slid down it.
My mind raced as to what was waiting for me when I got back to work. The captain was going to be furious, I’d probably get my badge taken, lose my retirement, or something worse, be demoted.
And then where would I be?
I finished the jello and started on the sandwich, looking out the window at the skyline. How the hell had I gotten her so stuck in my head that I would abandon all my morals and fuck her senseless?
The sick thing about it was I wanted to do it again.
What was it about this woman?
Two Weeks Later
Captain O’Leary was a mean SOB but he was damn good at his job, and running this precinct. He was also tired of my ass driving me up the wall, making his already hard job even harder.
“You’re looking better than you did when I dragged your ass out of that house fire,” he said as he barged into his office where I’d been waiting for thirty minutes.
It was my first official day back since the incident, but O’Leary wasn’t happy with me diving back in, probably because he wanted answers as to why I had been there in the first place.
“You dragged me out?”
“Yes,” he said. “You aren’t an easy man to carry so I dragged you. Hope the scratches weren’t too severe.”
“I didn’t even notice, sir.”
“Good,” he said, sitting down. “Now, how about you start with telling me what the hell you were doing there and I’ll consider keeping you on as one of my best detectives.”
There it was.
He had reached the end of his rope with me.
“I’ve been in contact with Stanley Dale, who had a hunch that the wife of the murdered businessman Oliver Benoit-Clayton was in fact a black widow.
I looked through his research and found links that would make her one.
She’s had multiple husbands all mysteriously die a few years after marrying her and so I decided to watch her to see how she reacted only to have her looking for her next husband just the next day.
Her interview with me was loaded with innuendo that she did do it, but she hides behind vague responses.
You gave me the heave ho to leave her be for now, so I was going to, but Stanley called me to tell me he was at a property of hers.
I was worried he would break and enter, so I traveled to where he was only to find the place empty, or so I thought. ”
“I’m going to stop you there, Garrick,” he said, holding his hand up. “The amount of rules you broke just in what you’d said already has my blood pressure rising.”
“She is a black widow, Cap. I wouldn’t be staking my career on anything less and you know it.”
“I know you’ve had a lot on these past few years, Garrick, I am sorry for your losses, but to target a woman who isn’t grieving the way you think isn’t the way to go.”
“Why does she hide her property holdings under another name? Why is she already dating someone? Let me pursue it under the radar. I won’t confront her unless I have solid proof and you know that.”
“You lost your wife over this job, Kane. Do you really want to lose your job too?”
It was never good when he used my first name.
“Doesn’t that tell you how much I believe in what I’m telling you?”
O’Leary rubbed his face in frustration. “You make sure you keep under the radar on this and you update me with everything. You can’t work on it full time, you still have cases to solve. Understand?”
“Yes, Cap.”
“I don’t want to hear complaints about you following society members around, okay? I can’t deal with the fuckers over in the DA’s office being antsy. You stay under the radar, yes?”
I nodded. “You know it.”
“Take it easy, Garrick, you don’t need to solve cases on day one.”
“No, but it’s preferable.”
He rolled his eyes as I headed out of the office and toward my desk. Tommy sat at his desk, reading a paper and drinking his coffee.
“That went better than I expected,” I told him.
“He likes you,” Tommy said without looking up. “I’ve never seen him give anyone as many chances as he does you.”
“Maybe if you had a close rate like I do, you’ll get the same treatment.”
Tommy sighed without looking up, but even he knew what I said was true. Ah, to be young and painful again, I thought.
“What do you have open at the moment?”
“Nothing, closed one two days ago. It’s been quiet ever since.”
“You been down to the cold case team?”
Tommy finally looked up at me. “No.”
“If you’re not busy, that’s what you do rather than sit around and look pretty.”
“You’ve been off for a few weeks, why don’t you do it?”
I rolled my eyes and got up, heading down the stairs to the cold case team’s office.
It was in a small room full of files. There had been advances in forensics in the last few decades and even just the last few years, but there were so many cold cases where no one wanted to talk so the cases remained cold.
If no one was willing to talk, the case wouldn't get reopened and would sit, cold, until it would be deemed unsolvable. They were the ones that drove me crazy the most. I hated not giving answers to grieving parents or spouses, there was just no closure. I knew a little bit about that and if that meant I worked a little harder to get the answer for them, then that’s what I’d do.
The cold case team were small, four detectives who pulled nine to fives due to family commitments.
Their close rate was minor, and it was known by everyone in the precinct that if you didn’t have an active case, you came down here to grab a box and work on it until you found the piece that would unravel the entire thing.
Opening the door, I tried to block out the musty smell that accompanied the old boxes sitting in the corner of the room. Three of the team were behind computers, barely acknowledging me as I walked in.
The fourth member, Janie, was smiling when she saw me heading toward her.
“Well, I should have known a simple house fire couldn’t bring down the might of Kane Garrick.”
I smiled at her, happy to see her still here. She’d transferred to the cold case team when her husband had been shot in an active shooter situation a few years ago. Now a single mother, she knew she needed the stability of a nine to five.
“You know it,” I replied. “Got anything ready for me? I’m finally free of a case.”
“That won’t last and you know it,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to sit at your desk and twiddle your thumbs?”
“Hand it over.”
Janie chuckled as she reached over and grabbed the file on the top of the pile. “Oh boy, this one’s a doozy. Grab a trolley.”
Perfect.
I needed to be as busy as I could to forget Maurelle, for a few days at least. She’d been on my mind constantly, haunting my dreams while I had been forced on leave.
There had been no trace left after I was hospitalised.
Everything she had was in her husband’s name or her daughter’s, and I couldn’t seem to find where she had disappeared to.
She’d pop up again eventually. I knew it, but for now…I needed to get back to some form of normality.
And a tricky cold case file was exactly what I needed to get me back in the game.
I took the file and looked down at the file name.
Shooting down the hallway to the storage room where all of our cold case boxes were held, I grabbed a trolley on the wall and started the process of moving them upstairs.