HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Read online

  “You act like I’ve already taken the job.”

  Argon had turned to look at Brendan in the passenger seat. His dark green eyes had flicked back and forth, seeing through to Brendan’s core. “You have,” he said.

  Still, Brendan had taken the 48 hours Argon said he had to decide. Somewhere around the fortieth hour, with an early spring snowfall coming down outside his apartment, he had started to pack his things.

  It had been three months. Brendan looked around now at the two-bedroom house he lived in. Most of his belongings were still in the mover’s boxes. There were three boxes marked “family,” and these were piled closest to the back wall of the dining area, sitting beneath the white lacy curtains that had come with the place.

  Brendan set his bag down inside the front door and walked into the kitchen. The room was off the dining area, a small galley kitchen, with white flooring, mirrored counter spaces, a sink and dishwasher on one side, cabinetry and refrigerator on the other. He opened the fridge and peered in. He found the grape juice and pulled it out. He took a glass down from one of the cabinets and filled it with ice from the refrigerator’s ice machine. The machine labored and clunked and finally spat out four wedges of ice in a rush. He poured the grape juice, put the bottle back in the fridge and returned to the entrance hall where he picked up his bag. With the ice tinkling in his glass and holding the bag by its leather strap he walked into the back of the house where his darkened living room was.

  The living room consisted of one small sofa, a coffee table, and end-table and a lamp. There was no stereo, no flat screen TV. On the coffee table was his laptop computer.

  He set the bag down on the coffee table next to the laptop and the drink on the end-table. He unzipped the bag and started to unpack its contents. After a moment, he had everything laid out in front of him. He opened the laptop and booted it up. Then he placed a call to the Sheriff’s Department, to Deputy Benedetto, and requested that a patroller make regular passes in front of Olivia Jane’s house throughout the night. He knew that surveillance was already on the Heilshorn property, and that the Department would be spread thin. But Benedetto agreed without much protest.

  After he hung up, Brendan took a sip of the grape juice, loosened his collar, and went to work.

  * * *

  Gentry Folwell, who lived across the street from the Heilshorn place, had been questioned by Delaney after the old farmer had gone on a shooting spree in pursuit of a woodchuck. The Heilshorn place was isolated, so there were no other neighbors to question. Brendan looked at the copy of Folwell’s statement.

  The old-timer had neither seen nor heard any suspicious activity across from his home that morning. He was an early-riser, he said, getting out of bed when the cock crowed, doing his stretches. That was how he stayed fit to run the farm. There were annotations that Folwell went on about his suspicion of global warming as the reason why his corn had failed. He was afraid of the farm going bankrupt.

  He had noticed the Audi in the driveway the day before. He was asked if that was the first time he’d seen the vehicle, but he couldn’t recall precisely. In other words, there was the possibility that Rebecca Heilshorn had only arrived at the house the previous day. Brendan jotted a note down in his black book that said “Timeline.” He made this the first entry. Tomorrow, he would construct a bigger version of the timeline on large sheets of paper at the office. Most detectives today used computers to build the timeline – there were several software programs – but Brendan felt he wanted to hand-write and lay everything out. It was a practice he’d begun back in the lab at Langone.

  The comments Folwell made about his farm potentially folding prompted Brendan to look into the records of the Heilshorn place. He consulted the notes from Donald Kettering, the hardware store owner and ex-boyfriend of the deceased girl. Kettering had called the place the Bloomingdale Farm. Brendan found tax records for it online, and a history of its turnover on a site called Zillow. The records went back to 1962, when the farm was sold for $82,000. This particular site didn’t list who the seller or buyer was, but Brendan already felt sure that the initial sale was by Bloomingdale.

  Brendan whistled through his teeth when he thought of buying that place for a $82,000. The tax maps showed it to be over 15 acres. The house was three stories with four bedrooms. There were two outbuildings, the tractor shed and a small kennel, and then there was the barn – the barn had appeared recently resurrected or rebuilt completely. Brendan checked the Kettering notes again. Kettering said it had been torn down and rebuilt.

  The property sold again in 1988 for a much heftier sum. It had almost tripled in value, according to Zillow, and had been purchased for nearly $200,000. There was no other record of sale until three years ago, when the building was sold and bought once more, this time for a cool million.

  The Heilshorns.

  Brendan sat back and ran a hand across his face. He took another sip of grape juice. He shut his eyes and rubbed them with his fingertips. Then he continued.

  Next, his mind jumped to suspects. He prepared to make a list of them. The tip of his pen hovered over the paper. Kettering had acted a little strangely, and might even have motive as an unrequited lover. But his alibi was strong.

  Still the pen hung in the air.

  Kevin Heilshorn had been emotionally distraught, but understandably so. In cases where someone close to the victim was the culprit, that person usually employed a different method to conceal guilt – they acted cool as a cucumber. What often aroused suspicion of a husband or boyfriend as the murderer was when they acted almost glib in their willingness to cooperate. Their lack of emotional outburst, lack of defensiveness, especially when accused of the crime, betrayed the dark truth. Kevin, on the other hand, had behaved like a grief-stricken brother who had expected to see his sister that morning and had been horribly and unexpectedly denied. Still, there was the glaring caveat of his actions later that day. Brendan could see him standing in the garden. He could feel his own finger pressing against the cool metal of the trigger, ready to squeeze. Bang. Bang.

  He didn’t believe Kevin Heilshorn had killed his sister.

  He turned his mind to the possibility of a break-in, of burglary, or, at least, a stranger. In certain cases he’d researched, victims of a violent crime suffered because of the misfortune of being in the wrong place. The aggressor held the grievance against someone else, or sought to steal something no longer there. Was it possible that Rebecca Heilshorn was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  Brendan thought again of the arrangement of the dresser drawers and how only the bottom drawers had been open. An inexperienced thief may have started with the top drawer and had to close each drawer to get to the next one while working down the column of three, but professional thieves weren’t likely to hit places out in the middle of nowhere, especially old rundown farms. It seemed more likely that the perp was in the house in search of something specific and had killed Rebecca in the process either to keep her quiet, or for some other reason.

  Brendan would continue to investigate prior ownership of the property to see if anything turned up that would hint at some discord between anyone and a previous owner, or anything to suggest something of value on the property. But, it wasn’t a priority right now.

  He still hadn’t listed a single suspect.

  The biological father of Rebecca’s daughter was next on his mind. He knew nothing about the man except his first name. Eddie.

  Was it Eddie whose boot print was on the door to Rebecca Heilshorn’s bedroom? Had a disgruntled ex come back seeking revenge for emotional pain, for a daughter that had been kept from him?

  Brendan needed to find Eddie and talk to him. The way to locate him might be through a signed paternity statement. He needed to find out the hospital where Leah was born. He needed to find everything about the little girl.

  Just as much, or even more, he needed to thoroughly research the victim. Where had she gone to school? Who were her friends? What was she
doing in an old farmhouse owned by her parents, miles from where she came from?

  It was interesting, the parallel between him and the victim. Brendan sat back from the computer and his notes, massaging the bridge of his nose. Both he and Rebecca were from Westchester. Both found themselves smack in the middle of New York State, the leatherstocking region of flat land, a few rolling hills, and hundreds of miles of green.

  He wondered if Rebecca had a past similar to his, too. Something driving her. Something she was running from. Had he run? Had Argon offered him, not the start of a new life, but an escape hatch from the pain of his old one?

  Lastly, Brendan opened up the manila folder and pulled out the worn copy of The Screwtape Letters. He pinched the note between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it out. What was the significance of the passage? He read it again. He looked at the note. Who was Danice? Was it her nickname? Was ‘K’ actually Kevin?

  Brendan’s thoughts circled back around to the young, angry brother. Kevin had lied about Rebecca having a child. Why? Maybe he was trying to protect her from someone like Eddie? If so, then why had Kevin come after Brendan and Olivia like a psychopath on a killing spree?

  And why in the hell was Brendan convinced of the young man’s innocence? Maybe he felt some sort of strange kinship with Kevin Heilshorn.

  With these ideas tumbling through his mind, still sitting up on the couch, his shirt unbuttoned, the ice cubes snapping in his glass of grape juice as they melted, Brendan laid back on the couch.

  It wasn’t until he was flat out that he realized how exhausted he was. It had been one hell of a day. And as he dropped into an inevitable unconsciousness, his day finally came to an end.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN / FRIDAY, 7:03 AM

  His cell phone was ringing. At first, Brendan was disoriented. He thought he was back in his house on Elmwood where he’d lived with his wife and daughter for two years. He could see their faces.

  He picked up the phone and answered. “Hello?”

  “Detective Healy?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is George Mace at the lab. I work with Stan Clark. Did I wake you?”

  “No.” Brendan’s eyes felt puffy, and he could barely see.

  “Okay. Ah, I thought you’d like to know right away. The laptop recovered from the trash at the victim’s house. Well, it’s crispy. There was no data we could get from the hard drive, which is melted to almost nothing. But we got something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “We were able to raise a serial number from the drive casing, which is metal. We got most of the numbers of the SN. Partial on the last two. So you’ll have a couple of possible permutations. I mean, twenty possible combinations. But, it’s something. Like to have what we got?”

  “Yes,” said Brendan. He sat up straight and fumbled for his pen. He wrote down the string of letters and numbers that the analyst gave him.

  * * *

  Brendan had a quick shower and a cup of black coffee, before heading to the offices in Oriskany. The day promised to be cooler than the previous one, according to the weather report on NPR’s “All before Eight” program. It was only supposed to reach the upper seventies. The sky overhead was the color of brushed steel, and the large cumulus clouds floated along with bright cottony nimbuses from the rising sun.

  As he drove, Brendan made his mental to-do list. He still hadn’t spoken with Deputy Bostrom. The day had been so hectic he hadn’t even gotten a statement from the first person to arrive at the scene of the crime. He needed to check back in with the lab later, of course; prints not belonging to the victim had been found throughout the house and the core scene of the victim’s bedroom. They would be run through the AFIS system to see if they matched anything on record, but Brendan’s job was to provide suspects who might match the prints. The lab would check Kevin Heilshorn, of course, but there was no probable cause to check the prints of Donald Kettering. He had already admitted to having been in the house anyway, and his alibi was strong. Unless a felon matched the prints, they’d get nowhere with them.

  The boot print on the door was the same story. The size and make of the shoe could be determined from the lifted print, with any luck, but matching that to the bottom of a real person’s shoe was a long way off. He only had the first name of Rebecca’s ex, Eddie, the supposed father of Leah. A cursory online search, pairing her full name with his first name, had yielded no salient results. He would have to look into it more thoroughly.

  As he turned onto Rome-Oriskany Road, Brendan thought that there might be an even more pressing issue. Kevin Heilshorn had agreed to be the one to contact the parents. Kevin’s personal identification had been enough to qualify him as a viable next-of-kin to identify the victim. As far as Brendan knew, the Coroner hadn’t placed a call to Rebecca’s parents. Perhaps now that he also had Kevin’s body on the slab, and his relation verified posthumously, Clark would have placed a call, but Brendan couldn’t be sure. It was possible that no one had yet contacted the parents of now two dead children. As far as he knew, their only two children. It might fall on him to break the news.

  He lit a cigarette as he pushed the Camry up to sixty-five miles per hour. The first cigarette of the day always felt like a mistake, like a relapse. He understood habit to be a very primal situation in the brain. All habits could be broken down into a simple equation: cue, routine, reward. Right now, his nerve cell receptors were being rewarded by the release of dopamine. What was curious, even after years of neurobiological study, was that Brendan could feel the physical satisfaction of the nicotine as its molecular components triggered the neurochemicals in his brain, yet he also felt the guilt.

  Nothing he’d seen in six years of study was able to account for what human beings call a conscience.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN / FRIDAY, 8:11 AM

  Brendan saw News Channel 6 was camped out in front of the Sheriff’s Department, and parked in the lot behind the building. A white van was there with the Syracuse News insignia on the side. A sliding side door rolled open, and a reporter and cameraman hopped out.

  “Shit,” he said inside his car. He banged out the door and walked briskly to the rear entrance of the Department, the reporter and his cameraman chasing him as he went.

  “Investigator. Investigator, please have a word with us.”

  Brendan’s mind raced. He hated this sort of attention. This was what they meant when they called a case “high profile.” A dead girl in a well-known farmhouse in the region. Not only dead, but stabbed repeatedly. Grisly, unexpected, sensational.

  He had two options. He could dart inside and see himself on TV later running from a news crew, or he could stop and face them. His heart thumped in his chest. His skin grew hot despite the cool morning. He turned to them before he reached the door.

  “Investigator.” The reporter was a young man, a little breathless. His brown hair was perfectly coiffed, and his face looked like it had just been painted. “What can you tell us about the young woman murdered in Remsen?”

  Brendan felt all his nerves firing. The camera light beamed upon him. The reporter stuck a microphone in Brendan’s face.

  “We’re working on it.”

  The microphone flipped back to point at the reporter’s mouth. “Any leads?” The microphone switched back.

  “We’re developing and following up leads as swiftly as we can.” His voice sounded like someone else was saying the words coming out of his mouth. He was reminded of standing over Kevin Heilshorn’s bleeding, dead body. Brendan’s skin rippled with gooseflesh.

  “And what can you tell us about yesterday’s police shooting? Is it true that the victim is actually the brother of the deceased Remsen girl? Is he a suspect in the murder investigation?”

  Brendan smiled grimly. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work. We will be giving the press an official statement later.”

  He quickly made his way inside, leaving the reporter calling after him.

  * * *

  Delaney was n
ot yet in the building. Brendan kept his head low as he walked along the corridor of the third-floor of the Department, and slipped into his office quietly, shutting the door behind him.

  He sat at his desk, opened his bag, and got out the case-file. He took a few moments to slow his pulse, to get himself under control. He stared at the binder and then, after a minute, he slid it aside. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his small notebook and flipped through it until he came to Olivia Jane’s number. He picked up the phone on his desk and dialed.

  The voice on the other end sounded wary. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Jane? I’m sorry to call so early. This is Investigator Healy.”

  “I know who it is.” She didn’t sound upset, only tired; a little feisty.