A Blood Thing Read online

  So the Kanes went about their days, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  When it finally did, it landed hard.

  Henry was at his desk, once again going over Gabriel Torrance’s case file, the procurement of which hadn’t seemed to have raised any red flags or set off warning bells, when his cell phone rang and the words Blocked Number appeared on its screen.

  “Kane,” Henry said into the phone.

  “Kane, it’s Egan.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m in. I’m on the edges of the case doing crap work, but I’m in. And I have information. Just remember, though, I’m not gonna compromise the investigation or do anything illegal. I’m only gonna share what you’d get in discovery soon enough anyway.”

  “Whatever. I’m still listening.”

  “It ain’t pretty for your brother.” Henry could hear the smug satisfaction in his voice. “During the search of his house, they found a pair of your brother’s sneakers in the garage with blood on them.”

  “And blood on an electric bike. I know about that. Is it Sally Graham’s blood?”

  “DNA results aren’t back, but it’s her type.”

  Henry was certain it would be her blood. Their caller would have planted it there.

  “There’s more,” Egan said, and again Henry didn’t like the pleasure he seemed to be taking delivering the news. “The other night they got an anonymous call from someone—sounded like a teenager, maybe. He was jogging when he saw some homeless guy pick up a small plastic shopping bag from under a bush. The homeless guy takes a peek inside, then drops the bag and runs away, like in a panic. The jogger goes over to the bag, looks inside, and sees a pair of latex gloves covered in blood and a bloody pair of women’s underwear.”

  Henry said, “Let me guess. Sally Graham’s blood type?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Did they get prints off the insides of the gloves?”

  “No, but you know that’s not always easy with gloves. Besides, he could have worn two pairs and disposed of the inside pair somewhere else.”

  “That’s their theory?”

  “I have no idea. But if I just thought of it, you know they have, too.”

  Egan had no idea how right he was. Henry had no doubt that Sally Graham’s real killer had done just that. “Let me take another guess,” Henry said. “They think there’s somebody else’s DNA on the underwear?”

  Egan fell silent a moment. A long moment. “How the hell did you know that?”

  The mysterious caller’s words came to Henry’s mind. The blood is definitely Sally Graham’s, and the DNA is indeed your brother’s.

  “Just a hunch,” Henry said. “What is it? On the underwear.”

  “Probably semen. They’re waiting on the DNA results for that, too.”

  To see if it matched the DNA sample they would have taken from Tyler. Which it would, of course. The dickhead caller would have seen to that. And if that were true . . . well, that would be extraordinarily bad. It would make Rachel Addison’s job very difficult. He had no idea how she could explain that away, other than claiming the test was faulty and the results therefore unreliable, which was a weak and desperate argument.

  He couldn’t begin to fathom how their mysterious caller had obtained a sample of Tyler’s semen.

  Henry realized at that moment that, in his entire life, he had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted to find and kill the son of a bitch behind this.

  “I’m not sure I should tell you this . . .” Egan said.

  “What?”

  “There’s something they’re holding back.”

  A common practice, Henry knew. Police often withheld from the public details of a crime to weed out false confessions and, perhaps more important, to help determine the guilt of suspects they arrested. If the suspect shared with the police knowledge of those details, there was a good chance he or she committed the crime, or at least knew who did. Even in the hands of the most inexperienced prosecutor, such information was powerfully persuasive evidence in court.

  “What is it?” Henry asked.

  “I probably shouldn’t—”

  “Don’t make me threaten you again. It’s getting old for both of us. Besides, it’s gonna come out eventually. So what are we talking about here?”

  Egan hesitated, then said, “The perp cut a smiley face into the vic’s torso.”

  “A smiley face?”

  “Yeah. Stab wounds above each breast—representing the eyes, they figure—and a slice across the stomach, curvy, like a smile. I saw the photos. It was messy.”

  “No doubt. But how does that implicate my brother?”

  “A character in one of the video games they took from his house does the same thing.”

  A light bulb flared on in Henry’s mind. “Those damn Smilin’ Jack games,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s a Vietnam War game, and the hero’s some kind of expert in hand-to-hand combat. When he kills an enemy, he stabs him twice in the chest to make eyes, then slices across the stomach for a smile.”

  The thought of Tyler, who seemed so young and innocent despite his twenty-nine years of age, spending so much time playing a game like that made Henry queasy. The memory of buying Tyler a Smilin’ Jack game for Christmas last year made him even queasier. God, he was getting old. Whatever happened to games like Twister and Operation?

  “The video game’s got the investigative team pretty excited. One of the disks was actually in your brother’s game console when they searched the house.”

  Henry rubbed his eyes. “Anything else?”

  “Damn, Kane, isn’t that enough for now?”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The prick meant it, too. He was enjoying himself. Henry could hardly blame him. He’d blackmailed Egan into doing this. Nonetheless, Henry wanted to kill him now, too, along with the guy who had framed Tyler for Sally Graham’s murder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I know this isn’t something you wanna talk about, Tyler,” Henry said, “but it’s important.”

  They were on the front porch, sitting in wicker rocking chairs. Molly had told him how much time Tyler had been spending inside the house, so he decided to bring his brother out for some air. There had been no lookie-loos peering over the wrought-iron fence when they’d stepped out here, but a young woman pushing a baby stroller was slowing down now as she passed on the sidewalk. Henry’s glare quickened her steps, and soon she was gone down the block.

  “Yeah, I don’t like talking about this stuff,” Tyler said, squinting into the late-afternoon sun that had slid low enough in the sky to peek under the porch roof.

  “I know, but like I said, it’s important. I need to know something.” Henry wasn’t quite sure how to ask what he needed to ask, or whether Tyler would be any more inclined to answer questions than he had been the other night. “Did you and Sally Graham . . .” He started over. “Did she touch you someplace private?”

  Tyler’s eyes widened. Then he tried to recover. “I’m going back inside, okay?”

  “No, buddy. Stay here. Talk to me.”

  Tyler shook his head.

  “Listen,” Henry said, “I already know that she did. I just need to hear it from you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s important.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Because it is.”

  Tyler looked away. “It’s sunny today.”

  Henry sighed. “Yeah, it’s nice.” He let his eyes wander. They fell on the big elm in the front yard, where a squirrel seemed to defy both death and gravity as it leaped from the safety of one branch to a distant one. He was about to give up on Tyler when his brother said, “She told me I was cute.”

  “She did?”

  He nodded. “And that she liked me. She put her hand on my leg and . . . I felt something change. You probably know what I mean.”

  Henry nodded. He didn’t want to speak and
impede whatever momentum Tyler was building.

  “She asked if she could touch me, and I told her she already was. And she said, no, she wanted to touch me . . . you know . . . there.”

  Tyler paused, and Henry waited him out.

  “I knew it was wrong because she wasn’t my girlfriend or anything, but I told her she could. So she . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “She took some girlie underwear out of her pocket. She said she was wearing it earlier. Then she . . . she put it on her hand, like a glove, and she . . . touched me with it. She made me . . . you know.”

  He knew. Sally Graham had given Tyler a hand job with her panties. And Henry knew why. Because the mystery dickhead told her to. Probably paid her to. She likely had no idea why he wanted it done—perhaps she thought it was a prank, or that he was Tyler’s caring uncle who wanted to see his nephew lose his virginity, in a manner of speaking. She very likely wondered why it had to be done in that specific way. But Henry knew the answer to that. He also knew that the caller had intended to kill Sally Graham from the start, but not before using her to create the evidence that would help frame an innocent man for her own murder.

  The caller was twisted and cruel. And very clever.

  “I know it was wrong, Henry. I shouldn’t have let her do that. You don’t have to tell Molly, do you?”

  The idea that what had very likely been Tyler’s first sexual experience with another person had been twisted into such a perverted parody of intimacy made Henry immeasurably sad.

  “Nah, Molly doesn’t need to know,” he said. Tyler looked the tiniest bit relieved. “It’s not your fault anyway,” he added. “You never had a chance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that sometimes it’s really hard for guys to resist the things that women can do for them. And because you’ve never experienced it before—at least, I’m guessing you haven’t—it’d be even harder for you. So don’t feel bad about letting it happen, okay? Or ashamed. You’re a good guy, Tyler. You’re my brother.”

  Tyler nodded. To Henry, he looked like a kid again, maybe eight years old, instead of a man closing in on thirty. It had been years since Henry’s heart had been this close to breaking.

  “I have to go now, buddy,” he said.

  “Can I come with you?”

  Henry sighed. “Tyler, I thought you understood—”

  “Gotcha,” he said with a small smile. “I was kidding. I know the rules. I promise.”

  Henry smiled back. He really loved his baby brother.

  As he drove away from the house, he became painfully aware, yet again, of how monstrously he had failed Tyler. God knows he had done things in his life he wasn’t proud of—things of which he was deeply ashamed, in fact. In order to survive, he had taught himself not to dwell on those things, to tamp down certain memories when they threatened to rise to the surface, but what he did to Tyler . . . he had never been able to push those thoughts far from his mind.

  It was painfully clear that Tyler wouldn’t be in this situation but for the tragic accident that had damaged his brain and forever limited his intellect. Were it not for that terrible moment on that terrible day, he might have achieved any number of wonderful things. He might have married, had a child or two. He might have moved across the country, or the world, to pursue dreams he never even got the chance to have because of his fall off the roof when he was seven. If not for that accident, everything in his life would have been different. And he almost certainly wouldn’t have met Sally Graham.

  And the accident that knocked Tyler’s life completely off track had been Henry’s fault.

  No one in his family ever acknowledged that fact to Henry, not his siblings, not his parents—not even Tyler—but they couldn’t fail to have been aware of it. It had been Henry, two years older than his younger brother, who had dared Tyler to take the sheet off his bed, climb onto the roof outside his room, and parachute to the ground. It was Henry who had stood on the roof, ignoring Molly’s pleas to stop Tyler, and Henry who had encouraged his brother when he’d seen Tyler’s resolve flagging. In his defense, he thought it could be done. He thought the parachute would work. And if it did, he was going to try it next. It was a lousy defense. He might have believed it would work, but he knew it was risky. Yet he let Tyler jump anyway—Tyler, who would have done anything Henry told him to do, anything to impress his older brother. The fact that Henry was just a kid at the time, too, was no excuse in his mind.

  A horn blared, startling Henry, who realized he had drifted too far toward the middle of the street. He corrected quickly, and the oncoming car passed by with plenty of room to spare, though that didn’t deter the other driver from giving Henry the finger. He didn’t care. He deserved it. He had knocked Tyler’s life off course more than two decades ago. He could never undo the damage he had done.

  But he could sure as hell do everything in his power to protect his brother now, to keep him out of prison. And he would, no matter what it took.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “His semen is on a pair of Sally Graham’s underwear?” Andrew said. “Along with her blood?”

  “DNA results aren’t back yet, but—”

  “The caller told us about this ahead of time,” Andrew finished for him, “that it would be her blood and his DNA.”

  “Yup.”

  Andrew was at his desk in his office on the fifth floor of the Pavilion, a red pen in hand, reviewing the draft of a bill his legislative team had written.

  “How the hell did his semen . . . ?”

  Henry told him, relating his entire conversation with Tyler.

  “That bastard,” Andrew said, trusting that Henry would know he wasn’t referring to Tyler.

  “I’m gonna ask around about Sally Graham, see if anyone saw her with anyone new lately, see if maybe she told anyone about having met our blackmailer.”

  “The cops have probably done all that.”

  “If they did, I doubt they worked it too hard. They focused on Tyler early. And now they have him. No reason to keep pursuing that angle.”

  Next, Henry shared with him information he’d gotten from Egan that the police hadn’t made public, about a smiley face cut into Sally Graham’s torso.

  “A guy in Tyler’s favorite video game does the same thing to his enemies,” Henry said. “They found Tyler’s games, of course, at the house.”

  “That’s bad, Henry.”

  Andrew thought about the various efforts the caller had made to frame Tyler. The man was frighteningly creative and thorough. Then a thought struck him. “How did you get this information? It’s not public, and there’s no way the prosecution shared this with Rachel Addison so soon.”

  Henry shrugged. “I have contacts.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone on the case would leak this to you.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “If you accessed files you aren’t authorized to—”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “Then how?”

  Henry hesitated. “You don’t need to know.”

  Andrew knew his brother was protecting him. If Henry had done something illegal or unethical and Andrew knew about it, the political fallout, for Andrew at least, could be something on the level of Three Mile Island. And it wouldn’t look good for Henry, either, especially given his Internal Affairs role.

  “Henry, I don’t want you doing anything against the law or—”

  “Thanks, but I’m a big boy. I can make my own decisions.”

  “But you—”

  “You’re the lawyer,” Henry said, cutting him off and changing directions. “Former prosecutor. How would you feel if you were trying this case?”

  Andrew’s thoughts stumbled momentarily, unready for the sudden shift in conversation. “Confident,” he finally said. “Really confident.”

  “Yeah, that’s my take on it, too. So I see only two options. First, we can let Addison do her thing building Tyler’s defense, help her however we can,
and hope for the best, trusting in a judicial process that we’ve both seen do its best but fall sadly short at times . . . hoping all the while that the mysterious dickhead is tapped out, that he won’t anonymously call in more tips about additional evidence implicating Tyler.”

  “If we do that, we can still give the mystery phone to the detectives on the case,” Andrew said. “As soon as the guy calls again, they’ll know it’s legit.”

  “They’ll think it’s a cheap, desperate tactic to create reasonable doubt. That we put someone up to it. Isn’t that what you’d think?”

  Instead of answering, Andrew said, “What are the odds that he’s tapped out? That he has no more evidence linking Tyler to the murder?”

  “Not good, I’d say. Which brings us to our second option.” He paused, then said, “Getting the video that will clear Tyler.”

  “By granting Gabriel Torrance executive clemency,” Andrew said, allowing a full dose of disgust to infuse his words. “Giving him a full pardon. Putting a convicted felon back on the street before he’s paid his debt to society in full.”

  “A guy with no prior record who committed a stupid but totally unplanned crime, then panicked. A model prisoner with only five months to go on a sentence of less than five years.”

  Andrew sighed in frustration. He couldn’t do what the caller was asking. Why didn’t Henry understand that? There had to be another way. Unfortunately, he couldn’t imagine what that would be.

  “How do we know this guy would even keep his word and give us the video? Hell, how do we know such a video even exists?”

  “We don’t. But Tyler’s innocent. He shouldn’t go to prison. It’s up to us to decide the best way to keep that from happening.”

  Andrew closed his eyes. His mind was suddenly a maelstrom of thoughts and questions, possibilities and ramifications. Finally, he said, “The guy might not even call again.”

  “For some reason,” Henry said, “he wants Torrance out of prison. And soon. He’ll call.”

  He called almost five hours later, while Andrew was brushing his teeth before bed. Andrew had left both cell phones—his own and the mystery phone—on his nightstand. With the water running and the toothbrush in his mouth, he didn’t hear the latter’s vibration against the wooden surface beneath it. He almost didn’t hear Rebecca call from the next room, “Andy? The black phone is ringing.”