Killer: Karma Inc. Case 5

  Killer

  Karma Inc. Case #5

  Gillian Zane

  The goal of all life is death.

  Sigmund Freud

  Contents

  1. The Next Big Thang

  2. Donuts & Dead Bodies

  3. Eighty Times Dead

  4. Insecurities & Orgasms

  5. Heroes with Prejudice

  6. Going to a P-rade

  7. The Internet is Forever

  8. Who’s Lying Now?

  9. Snitches Dig Ditches

  10. Pay the Piper

  11. The Hall of Records

  12. Waiting…

  Waiting

  13. Something Missing

  Waiting

  14. Too Many Cassandras

  Waiting

  15. Die Another Day

  16. White Knight

  17. Knowledge Found

  18. Time Irrelevant

  19. Celestial Divorce Proceedings

  20. What’s behind door number two?

  Epilogue

  Thank you

  To my 11th grade religion teacher. You inspired me…

  1

  The Next Big Thang

  “Castalia Rosso, here to see Detective Troy Delaney.” His name stuck to the roof of my mouth like I had recently chomped down on an overly slathered peanut butter sandwich. It was a serious testament to my will to survive that I had walked into this precinct. I gripped the messenger bag to my stomach like it was a security blanket and tried not to show any outward signs of my discomfort. People who look nervous around the police tend to be up to no good.

  The desk cop looked up from the mounds of paperwork in front of him, gave me a tired once over and picked up the phone. He began randomly punching numbers on the switchboard, not even bothering to look at what he was doing. I caught my reflection in the windows along the west wall and hoped I had changed my look enough that there wasn’t any resemblance to the woman I once was. To the newbie officer that used to work here.

  My hair was now shaped in a dark black bob around my face, and I had even given myself bangs. I was also a bit heavier than I once was, curvier than the stick of a girl I had been. There was more padding to my face, but it still retained the same shape, and I couldn’t change my eyes no matter how hard I tried. I hoped the extra weight gave me the appearance of being softer, friendlier, which was ironic, since it was the exact opposite of what I was now compared to how I had been. I might have been a rookie cop when I was alive, headstrong and rather bitchy, but death had made me harder. Dying had made me jaded, and stripped me of my ability to see the good in other human beings.

  When I first walked into this cop shop, I had been hopeful, full of life, such a different person. That girl had been befriended by a detective on her first day on the job, and now two years later I was here to destroy him. Fuck yeah, I was jaded.

  It seemed like so long ago. Like another person. But here I was. Back at the same place I had been when I was alive. Here to find that same detective who had been one of my only friends on the force. Here to befriend him again. Only this time I wasn’t looking for friendship. I only wanted to get close enough to find his weaknesses and exploit them.

  The detective, my old friend, was supposedly dirty.

  I hadn’t believed it at first. I pored over the case files for hours with Drake, and I had to admit that the prognosis didn’t look good.

  “Miss Rosso,” Troy called and poked his head from behind the admittance door.

  “Fresh meat?” The prettiest man I had ever laid eyes on stood in front of me. I wasn’t usually prone to fits of female hormones, but I almost dropped the crap coffee that I had been sucking down all morning. Obviously I had to reconsider my theory that I could drink as much caffeine as I wanted with no thought to the consequences.

  It had been a day of frayed nerves and insecurities.

  I hadn't felt this uncomfortable in my own skin since my first day of middle school. I had been trying all day to hide my hands, which hadn’t stopped shaking, or my palms, which were coated in sweat that I had to keep wiping on my new polyester pants. The nerves, and the new pair of boots, had also turned my usual light-footed gait into the fumbling movements of a klutz, epic enough to grace the pages of a young adult novel.

  Two steps back I had almost taken out an office chair. Now I was juggling my cup of coffee because of an inane comment by the hottest man on the planet. FML.

  “Excuse me?” I said in the bitchiest voice I could muster as I adjusted my belt full of all the tools, gadgets, and deadly apparatuses that had been issued to me as an officer of the law.

  “Fresh meat,” the man laughed and I restrained the urge to grimace. Damn, he was pretty, but the stupid comments from my fellow officers had been slapping me around all day. All of them in the same vein as “fresh meat” were fraying my already frayed nerves. Unfortunately, pretty people were allowed to say stupid shit, so they got away with it more than the less fair folks. And again…damn was he pretty. Like, he should be a male model pretty, not wearing some cheap suit, and sporting a ten dollar haircut, but I was done with the hazing.

  “Yup, I’m fresh meat, I guess. It’s my first day. Great fucking observation, Detective. I’m here to see Captain…”

  “You have first day written all over you,” he interrupted.

  “Your detective skills are astounding. You, by the way, have washed-up detective written all over you. How’d I do?” I asked with a bit more snark than I had planned. He choked out a laugh.

  “Funny girl.” He patted me on the shoulder, his hand engulfing most of it, emphasizing just how much bigger than me he was. I felt small in my crisp new uniform, with my big gun at my hip. But if we were in a gun fight, he would make for a better target.

  “I’m Troy.” He flashed me a smile that would have weaker girls drooling and he held out his hand.

  “Cassandra,” I replied, fighting the urge to squeeze his hand a little too hard.

  “With that attitude, Cassandra, you’ll fit right in. Welcome to the team.”

  He was still as slick as I remembered. He made me nervous when we first met. He was pretty, guy pretty, but I had become used to him over the course of months I had worked in his vicinity. Sure, he still had the perfect skin and chiseled look of a god, with full lips and big blue eyes that gave him an effeminate look that was so common in male models, but it became background as you got to know him. His ego had a way of filtering out the pretty. He knew how he looked. He spent hours on his style, on his body, and the guys would joke how he never met a mirror he didn’t like.

  “Detective Delaney.” I stood and extended my hand to shake.

  “Call me Troy.” He did a slow perusal of my body and my nose twitched as I tried to keep my smirk in check. I had to cement this relationship first before I tore it all down. Cement a professional relationship.

  “Troy,” I said and forced a smile. “Call me Cas.”

  “Cas, great, c’mon back.” He held the door for me and led me to a group of cluttered desks with paperwork stacked all over them. They were situated in a large room, with different partitions separating certain departments. It was a small precinct, and most of the departments shared the largest room in the building. Homicide had the biggest area, nearest to the interrogation rooms and vending machines.

  He motioned to the chair next to one of the cleaner desks, flipped another chair around and took a seat on it backwards, legs spread. I took the seat across from him and placed the messenger bag on my lap to act as a barrier between us.

  “That’s the laptop?” he asked and I nodded, reluctantly placing the bag on the desk in front of him.

  “Like we discussed on the phone, I didn’t touch it. I gr
abbed it from the site before he fled. There is film that can corroborate how I came into possession of the laptop.”

  Troy laid his hands on the bag, and the moment he pulled it across the desk and took possession of it, the energy hit me like a shockwave. It pounded into me with an intensity that was almost orgasmic. It seemed to be getting more intense for me every time it occurred.

  It felt so good, so real, as the karma flooded into me. I almost laughed out loud with the pleasure of the pure life energy. Somehow I managed to keep a cool outward appearance as my insides were doing the tango.

  “Digital can’t wait to get their hands on this. They’ve been talking about the case non-stop since I filled them in. This should be interesting. They’ve already seen the footage that Theodore Wilken sent over, it was quite a show, Cas.”

  “Yes, it was,” I nodded.

  “You knew it was a scam from the get-go?” he asked, not an inkling of skepticism on his handsome face.

  “I knew something was going on.” I found no reason to lie to him. I was supposed to be a psychic medium.

  “What a coincidence that I had been given authorization to bring you in, and you were already closing your own case,” he laughed and ran a hand over the bag in front of him.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, Detective,” I said with as straight of a face as I could muster.

  “I guess you wouldn’t.” He pursed his lips and regarded me with new interest. Troy Delaney was a complex man. He was practical in every sense of the word, almost to the point of being regimented. He was former military, which didn’t work out as well as he would have liked. They let him off with an entry level separation for flat feet of all things. He still used his military background to structure his life to a semblance of perfect order, every detail…except his one vice. A vice which had brought everything crashing down around him, or was about to. Gambling.

  He loved a good card game, but living in a city that was far removed from any gambling establishment, he found his games in back alleys and private homes, usually mob run. His gambling also gave him an intensely superstitious fetish, especially as he had begun to lose. His debt accrued, the mob lapping up all of his extras, dying to get their hooks into anyone with a badge, and his oddly OCD take on all things supernatural increased. It became a tick for him. If salt spilled, it must be thrown over the shoulder in a certain way, ladders avoided if they were in his path, he only slept on the right side of the bed, and I could go on and on about all I read in his file. It might seem silly, his adherence to odd superstitions, but it gave me a way to get onto this case. With superstitions came a belief in psychics. Which was why he was willing to stick his neck out to hire one.

  People might think it was odd, a dirty cop utilizing a psychic to solve crimes. Wouldn’t the psychic know he was dirty? The thing about Troy, though, was he didn’t think he was dirty. He knew he bent the rules, he knew he helped bad people do bad things, but he also passionately tried to solve his cases, and he got a sense of satisfaction from locking up the bad guys. The ones who didn’t pay him, of course. He seriously thought his work in the white hat zone would eradicate his other black hat jobs. Balance the scales, so to speak. And this superstitious streak, along with his desperate need to solve the cases he had on his desk, was his way of balancing the scales. He thought he was okay, he thought he was untouchable.

  It didn’t balance the scales, though. No matter how many cases he solved, his aura had stubborn dark spots clinging to it like spray paint on cement. The only way he could redeem himself was if he shed the influence of his benefactors. In the beginning he could have easily done this. He could have gone to his superiors and told them about the shake-down. They could have offered protection; hell, they might have used Troy’s influence to make a case and gotten him undercover work.

  But he didn’t do this; it never even crossed his mind. He wanted to continue to gamble, and that became the priority. If he would have gone to his superiors he might have been able to gamble while he was working undercover, but when the case was closed they would watch him like a hawk, not to mention he’d be blacklisted from any future establishments where gaming was enjoyed.

  Nothing he could do as an officer of the law, no case he solved, would ever eradicate the darkness that pooled around him.

  The only one who could do that was me.

  “I pulled a few cases where we’ve hit dead ends, cases we really need to get solved. It will help with morale in this department…”

  And with his career.

  I nodded as he went on.

  “How do you want to do this? All at once? Do you need something to touch?” he asked.

  “No, not objects. I have to work with people. I read them. I would need to talk to witnesses, or someone close to the cases.”

  “I think I have just the case.” He shuffled through the files and pulled out one.

  “This one still haunts me. Missing child, I can get in touch with the parents.” Troy handed me the file and I flipped it open.

  “A kidnapping?”

  “Two-year-old boy, Liam O’Neal. He was taken in a staged carjacking that turned out to be a kidnapping. At first we suspected he would turn up, which happens a lot in carjacking cases, they abandon the kid somewhere. Worst case scenario, he turns up dead. They’ll kill the kid if they are particularly ruthless. But the end result was a ransom demand. The father reported that when they took the car, it seemed odd, almost rehearsed. And when the ransom demand came in, we concluded the end result was the child and not the car.”

  “Any suspects?” I asked.

  “None, they wore masks. It was during the summer so it stood out. One was female and they were both Caucasian. There was one ransom call made, but nothing more. We think they got spooked when the parents called in the police. We suspect the child is dead.”

  “I need to talk to the parents,” I said.

  “I can arrange that. They still live in the area. So, I’m assuming this means you want the job? Do you have a consultant fee or something?” he asked with a skeptical look crossing his face, waiting for the shoe to drop.

  “No, I wouldn’t charge for this,” I said.

  Troy’s face lit up, his smile was contagious.

  2

  Donuts & Dead Bodies

  I waited around at the precinct while Troy called the parents, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. There were goosebumps up and down my arms. I rubbed at them self-consciously and avoided eye contact with the other cops that were curious to see what I was doing with Troy.

  Everything about the place was so familiar, but then so far removed, as if I was looking at an old favorite movie that I had watched over and over again, but hadn’t seen in a long time.

  Cops weaved in and out of the desks, hauling in arrests, interviewing witnesses. I recognized some, but not everyone. I caught sight of a wall of photos, all of the fallen, and there was the big smile that was my own, smiling down at me like nothing was wrong.

  “Sooooo…this is where you work.”

  “What are you doing here?” I was about to punch out, my long shift finally over, when I got a call from the front desk that I had a visitor. Lauren sauntered into the bullpen with her fuck-me pumps clacking on the linoleum floor like she belonged here. She sat provocatively on one of the desks in homicide, crossing her legs, making her tiny dress even tinier as it slid up her leg.

  I tried not to be annoyed as I noticed she was wearing my heels, and they were now propped up on a chair, flashing my new coworkers. She was getting the wrong type of attention. They probably thought she was a working girl bust.

  “Wanna introduce me to your friend, Mercier?” Atachaya from Vice came sauntering in the room and looked Lauren up and down. She preened and I rolled my eyes. If anyone could spot a hooker, it was Atachaya.

  “Lauren, Aaron Atachaya.” I motioned back and forth between the two. I thought Atachaya would leave but he stayed like he was now part of the conversation.

&nb
sp; “Lauren, what are you doing here?” I repeated.

  “Your shift’s over, right? Jimmy dropped me off and I thought I would hitch a ride back with you and have a girl’s night. It’s been too long.” Her words were right, but nothing touched her eyes. No emotion. We hadn’t spoken since our fight about Pete. I had tried to text her a few times, and she hadn’t responded. I had even pulled back from Pete to see if that helped Lauren acclimate and he was getting fed up with the both of us. Personally, I was getting fed up with the both of them too.

  He told me over the phone last night that he and Lauren were fine, and he didn’t know what my deal was. That he had even gone out with her a few times, since I was so busy with my new dangerous job. He had waited for my expected response, one he thought I would give, implying that they were out having a good time without me. I wanted to say it made me jealous. I wanted to say I had missed him, but it would be a lie. Between him pushing for me to declare my love for him after every phone call, then get married and pump out kids…and now with this drama with Lauren. Well, honestly, I was enjoying being on my own for a bit. I had begun to push him away because of Lauren’s reaction, but now, after finally having a bit of space from them, it was actually refreshing.

  “I didn’t think you wanted to hang out with me,” I said glaring at Atachaya until he got the point. He held up his hands and made his way to the other side of the room.