Sanguine Vengeance Read online

  Sanguine Vengeance

  A novel by

  Jason Dias

  All rights reserved

  Also from Jason Dias:

  Anthologies:

  The Necro-Om-Nom-Nom-Icon (editor)

  For An Uncertain Future

  The Endpoint of Sentience

  Novels:

  The Girlfriend Project

  The Worst of Us

  Half-Lives

  What Hope Wrought

  Series:

  Because of Her Shadow:

  For Love of Their Children

  To Bury Their Parents

  To Remember Their Names (coming soon)

  For An Uncertain Future

  Non-fiction:

  Values of Pain

  Poetry:

  Violet Haze

  Connoisseurs of Suffering (Editor, with Louis Hoffman)

  Contents

  Acknowledgements and dedications

  Order

  Law

  Chaos

  Disorder

  Crime

  Punishment

  Night

  Day

  War

  Peace

  Love

  Hate

  Will

  Power

  Freedom

  Destiny

  Lightness

  Being

  Nightmares

  Dreamscapes

  Search

  Meaning

  After

  Excerpt from The Worst of Us

  Acknowledgements and dedications

  Thanks to the crew of people who read this manuscript and offered good advice. Good advice isn’t always easy to hear, and therefore takes courage and love to share. Fatma Alici, Rebecca Carpenter and Marla Bell all took the time to do this for me.

  Order

  I passed Eads in the hallway, on my way upstairs to see the company shrink.

  “You got the cast off,” she said.

  “Ah, just a sling, and that only for safety. Good as new.” I kept going.

  “Good to see you back, Detective.”

  Wilcox, on the stairs. “Hey. Looking good, Detective. Welcome back.” He leaned in and whispered, blocking my way. “Dennis is fine. Because of you he’s fine. To listen to the news, nobody knows you’re a hero…”

  “Thanks. Look, I’m late for my psych eval. I’m not back yet, not until the doc clears me. You mind?”

  “Sure.” He gave me some space, whistled his way down the stairs.

  The city had seen enough tragedies. The church shooting had been enough collective trauma to last all of us. I was one of only a couple of people who’d been on the force when that went down, first on the scene. We didn’t need any more collective traumas. Even more than Dennis being alive, I had that on my mind.

  I didn’t see anyone else. Daniels’ office (Daniels PsyD) sat right next to Daniels (Captain) – a cause of some confusion for rookies. I picked the right door and went inside.

  The shrink waited: a sixty-something man with pretty eyes framed by glasses. Round, gold rims, lenses kept clean, little reading lenses set in at the bottom, his hair askew.

  Does he even know what a stereotype is?

  We chatted for a minute, then got down to it.

  “So your partner was engaged with the suspect. Close-quarters fighting. The suspect finished with Daniels and advanced on you. You shot the suspect, once center mass. Report says… twenty feet? That’s good shooting. Suspect died on the scene.”

  Outside, rain fell against the window. It would be a cozy sound in a cozy place except all the furniture was police-issue. Gray file cabinet, gray desk, institutional chairs in that fabric that itches you through your clothes. He had on a herringbone coat with patched elbows and I had on my police blacks. Took some of the cozy out of the moment. Plus, he’d been out in the rain, so that herringbone stank of wet wool. The only spirit in the place came from a miniature Christmas tree atop the file cabinet: fired clay, green glaze, little glass beads lit by a bulb inside.

  I kept eye contact. Careful, feminine eye contact. “I’m a good shot, Doctor Daniels. I train very hard so that in a crisis situation, I know what to do and I can do it.”

  “It’s good to be confident, and to be justified in your confidence.”

  He waited. I waited. He broke the silence after about a minute.

  “Drugs?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I mean, have you used anything recreational?”

  “No,” I said. I wanted to fold my hands in my lap but I’d learned a thing playing poker: never move. Everything is a tell. No money on the table right now, but maybe my career, and no knowing how a shrink would read the tells. My innocence didn’t help anything.

  “Alcohol? Sex?”

  “Again, no thanks, and no thanks.”

  “Stale jokes,” he said.

  “Around here? That counts as the height of wit, Doc.”

  He sighed, nodded to himself. “You’re not being the most open with me, Sanchez.” I started to interrupt but he waved me off with his left hand, a vague gesture. “Don’t worry about it. It’s expected. You think I have a lot of power over you that I might use in an unjustified way. Shit, you could be right, from your point of view. Anyway. You’re not being the most open with me, but I don’t see anything here to worry about. I’ve really just got one question left.”

  “Yes?”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “This thing went good, Sanchez. But it could have not. Your file is as long as any file on a thirty-year career officer. You never went past detective, and that means you’ve been out there the whole time. You’ve seen it all.”

  “Is that the question?”

  “I’m getting to it. You’ve been in here before. Twice, if memory serves. You know what we’re like and you know what I’m like. Be patient. Thing is, you’re out in the shit for thirty years, it can screw with your sense of perspective. With your ability to trust.”

  “I trust you, Doc. Within a certain set of parameters.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I mean, trust that the world is decent and orderly. That cause leads to effect. That when you hit your brakes your car will stop. You see too much of the bad side of humanity, you stop being able to sit in a restaurant with your back to a room. You know what I mean? You get jumpy. Shaky, even. You start shooting first and only have faith in other cops.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing. You don’t seem to have lost that basic faith. You’re normal. As normal as any beat cop could possibly be, anyway. People like you OK. You have relationships. Friends. You eat healthy, no disciplinary issues, tox comes back clean every quarter.”

  “Doc, I got work to do. Officer involved shooting… the paperwork is so heavy I almost wish you would pull me off duty for a couple weeks so I could have time for it.”

  He smiled. “Here it is, then: how come you aren’t shaken? How come you haven’t lost your basic sense of orderliness? Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I think I track you. It’s simple, really.”

  This time, I used the dramatic pause, made him ask: “Yes?”

  “I have faith.”

  “Oh.” He opened the beige file on the desk between us. “I don’t see anything like that in here. What denomination?”

  “Not God, Doc. This.” I touched the firearm at my hip. “Look. I point it, I pull the trigger. If I’ve kept in practice, the bullet goes where I want it to. If I’ve kept the gun clean, if I’ve kept it loaded and well oiled, I can hit any target at twenty feet or even at thirty. It’s predictable. Orderly, like you’re saying. I can’t say who I’m going to meet out there or what shit they might try to pull, but I know that, in the end, this one thing i
n the whole crazy universe is totally predictable. Over this, I have complete control.”

  Daniels nodded, even smiled a little. “All right. Thanks. Now get out of here, will you?”

  He meant it to be friendly, one cop to another, but he wasn’t a cop. He never worked a beat. He sat in that little office all day worrying about us, worrying about right and wrong, sick and well, in some abstract sense. Never really put his body in the way of harm.

  I stood and left with no further comment. The door shuddered shut at my push. Too loud. Aggressive. Nothing to be done for it now.

  Six more weeks and I would be an ex-cop, a retiree with too much time and no plan on how to spend it. A pension, a little house just big enough for me, and an open future.

  Law

  I tried to get to my office but Burt filled up the hallway. A little over six feet tall and just over two hundred pounds, she physically intimidated me. Nobody else in the building boasted that.

  “Need you to go to this address.” She handed me a Post-It note.

  “You don’t know how to text?”

  “I’m old-fashioned. Bite me. Just go there. Homicide. Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  Burt turned sideways. I sidestepped around her. “You’ll have to see it. Pathologist is done there. They’re waiting on you to walk through before they move the body. Better get going.”

  I glanced at the address. “This is downtown. Twenty minutes. I like your shoes.”

  Inside joke. Burt – short for Beatrice – wore a men’s size 13. I wore an 11 myself. Most of the women on the force wore men’s shoes because they were practical, but they were a dead giveaway undercover. She didn’t say anything, just quietly went on her way to whatever lieutenants did when they weren’t sending detectives out to look at corpses.

  “Let’s clean this up quickly.”

  She had the church on her mind. We all did, all the time. “Quick and quiet. This town’s been through enough.”

  Burt grunted and shambled down the hall towards her office.

  I grabbed my tablet and my jacket. Burt would have carried a pencil and a pad of paper. I could do everything with that tablet, though. Pictures, recorded interviews, notes, Google and databases. Two short hallways and out a heavy steel door into the back lot. Pool cars rested under a sky fading to gray. City lights reflected off low, white clouds, keeping night seemingly at bay. There would be snow on a night like this.

  On a patrol, I would have maybe had a partner. Dennis’ medical leave left me flying solo. Stanton Springs was a quiet, midwestern sort of place, though, and bad things rarely happened. A homicide was something of a novelty. A low-risk call-out like this, I had a cruiser to myself: one of the old Crown Vics that ought to have retired five years ago. I slid in, started her up. Cold leather seats pressed against my body. The pool mechanic kept the car running clean and smooth. The odometer read 347665 9/10.

  I made it downtown in sixteen minutes. Four minutes escaping the station house made it around twenty. The address, two blocks from our central business district, was a little post-war bungalow with a faded picket fence. Lights splashed over everything. Four patrol cars – the newer Dodges – as well as an ambulance, all spinning their disco lights. A black compact that probably belonged to the county coroner. No lights, no badges. Two EMT’s stood at the doorway, one either side like ornaments or maybe guards.

  “Evening,” I said, heading in. I knew them by name. Last name, anyway. Crash clean ups and OD callouts bring us together. Jacobs was the lady, Harris the guy.

  Inside, Eads, Washburn and Clyde stood around the crime scene. They wore the little booties to keep the rug clean but just being there they were shedding hairs and fibers, making footprints in the ugly shag carpet, and generally disturbing the space. “Hey, what did I tell you guys about standing around the crime scene?”

  “Sorry, detective,” Eads said, sliding out with a stupid grin on her face. The other two took up station at the door.

  Great. Now there are four guards. Or ornaments. Or whatever.

  “Keep it inconspicuous, can you?”

  “Yes, Detective.” They didn’t move, though. They hadn’t seen the crying faces, the shock. I’d seen them and so had Burt. Our first job: protect the city from danger. Our second: preserve their illusion of safety.

  The space made more sense empty of gawkers. It had clearly been disturbed. First of all, I noticed the smell. A bunch of living humans in one space left behind the musk of their perfumes and deodorants, their natural body odors, their shampoo. The smell of the fabrics we drape over our bodies, of the leather of our shoes. It’s subtle sometimes, sure, but it’s there: you can smell an empty room.

  The rug was disturbed. Just a little off of square, one corner folded over. The TV sat in front of the window. Somebody didn’t like glare on their screen. It was pretty old, a big 1980’s model four feet tall. The couch, a green leather number that looked well-loved, faced the screen and the window. It wasn’t quite square with that wall, though. Maybe those goofball cops had moved it – an inevitable consequence of human occupation. Maybe the resident had. I glanced around and saw everything else squared off, right-angled as if with a set square. No decorations: the victim observed no holidays.

  Kitchen behind me. Dishes done and set in a rack to dry. Stove clean, forest green with a black top, old-fashioned iron burners. Scrubbed and tidy. Microwave, clean inside. No, the resident didn’t jiggle the sofa then leave it that way.

  Back bedroom. My colleagues’ lack of crime-scene courtesy hadn’t extended to loitering in the room with the corpse. They were just cold from hanging around outside waiting on the Detective.

  A single bed, made so tight my drill instructor at the academy could have bounced a quarter off it, occupied the mathematical center of the room. A nightstand, Goodwill quality, brown, faded but clean. Lamp. Small table with a wind-up clock, a handful of keys, a pill bottle. On the floor between the door and the bed lay a naked little man.

  The corpse: pale, even for the Midwest in winter, adorned with brown corduroy house shoes and nothing else. The front door opened and cracked shut, a storm door drawn on one of those hydraulics that fights with a spring. The dead guy didn’t react. No signs of a struggle. The body didn’t look natural. More like somebody had dropped it here next to the bed, arms and legs flopping where capricious gravity dictated, head turned to one side. The whole room felt wrong. The body felt wrong.

  “Spinal cord injury,” said the woman who had come through the door. Jolene, the coroner. “Damn peculiar.”

  “He just fall down on the spot and break his neck?”

  “Meals on Wheels called it in. He was a retired priest. He didn’t come for his supper when they rang the bell.”

  “Heart attack? Time of death?”

  She sighed. “Been waiting on you, Dom. Haven’t taken the liver temp. I sure haven’t opened him up to check his arteries.”

  “You know the neck is broken how?”

  “Just look at it.”

  I did. And that sense of wrongness concretized around the angle of his head to his back. It looked pretty fatal.

  She said, “No kind of fall would result in that body position. Especially with the head all twisted around like that. You have plans for Christmas this year? You should come over, eat a little ham. Anyway: looks more like somebody broke his neck then carried him in here and dropped him like a load of laundry.”

  My thoughts exactly. “You know I’m not into holidays. Prefer to keep busy. I’ll work a shift or even two. Beef up that retirement check, let one of the young guys go home for the day.” Through the door to the right I found an attached bathroom. Lights were off. I used my tablet as a flashlight, poked my head in. “There’s his clothes.” Black slacks. Faded blue jockey shirts. Gray shirt, white undershirt. “Retired, you said?” A white priest collar rested on the sink, next to the basin. And something else: a brass-colored key.

  “You get what you need in here? I want to move h
im back to the office.”

  “Let me look once more. Still something wrong here.” I stepped out of the toilet and glanced around the little bedroom, not focusing on any one thing. I used the tablet in video mode, sweeping around the place.

  “Take your time.”

  I did. I stepped out and back in again. Something wrong; something didn’t fit.

  The pillow on the bed. The bed was made military-tight but the pillow sat on top of the blankets. Not tucked neatly underneath. Crumpled, untidy. I put on neoprene gloves from a baggie in my back pocket. Picked up the pillow. It felt wrong: too heavy. Not feathers or foam. Something bulkier. I should have waited for the crime scene techs; they would want to pick the pillowcase for hairs or something, but they were useless anyway – around here, we did police work. So no waiting. I dumped the pillow out of the case.

  “Are those socks?” Jolene in the doorway, impatient.

  “Small.” Kids’ socks. “This just took a dark turn. What did you say the guy’s name was?” Thinking of reporters and grieving parents. No chance of closing this up fast, then.

  “I didn’t. The cops outside just told me he was a retired priest. They got it from the Meals on Wheels driver.”

  Twenty-two socks. Mostly plain white athletic socks, like boys would wear. I’d run into a lot of sex offenders, enough to abbreviate them to SOs. None of them had been Catholic clergy. Undeserved stereotype. But it did happen. Usually serial killers took trophies and pedophiles didn’t. Maybe something else was happening here. Maybe a fetish. But my hackles perked up and my stomach sank into my bowels.

  The tablet worked good enough as a phone. All-purpose device. I called Burt on the line on her office number – an old-fashioned multi-line phone with a cradle and a cord. “We have a problem.”

  “What?” she said. Flat.

  “A pillowcase full of boys’ socks. Looks like he slept on it. These socks aren’t clean. He didn’t get them at the laundry or the Super Target.”

  “Shit. Uh… Take lead on this. I’ll assign you a uniform to help with the legwork. Who do you want?”

  “Give me Watanabe. She’s reliable. And discrete.”