HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Read online

  “I mean, mentally.”

  Delaney shrugged. He stopped leaning on the cabinet and stood up. “I don’t know. She’d know better how she was doing than I would. Look. You’ve got your evening cut out for you. Give your statement, don’t leave out a detail. I can be there if you need me. I’ll help you through. In the meantime, I’ll get the blood and toxicology report from the kid. I’m telling you, we’re going to match it up with the victim’s PERK, and it’s going to be case opened and closed in one fucking day. Some perverted family thing.”

  Brendan sighed. He didn’t have the energy to argue. And some of what Delaney was saying sounded convincing. It was tough to lobby for the innocence of Kevin Heilshorn given all the circumstantial evidence. None of it was enough to mount an ironclad case, not without the hard forensics, but Delaney seemed more than confident. He and Skene would be on the same page; a posthumous conviction was impossible anyway. They would be unable to pursue criminal prosecution against Heilshorn because a dead man couldn’t defend himself.

  Though pinning it on him would let them drop the case.

  Brendan closed his eyes. The world was dark for a moment, and then Kevin Heilshorn’s face swam into view. Brendan saw him staring up at the sky. He saw the blood spatter, showering the flowers and plants and vegetables. Then time moved backwards. In his mind, Kevin was standing in the garden, one hand on his neck, the other pointing the gun. Brendan pulled the trigger. Bang. Bang.

  His eyes fluttered open. He got to his feet. Delaney watched him closely.

  “I’ve got to get out of here for a minute,” said Brendan. “Get some fresh air.”

  “Sure,” said Delaney.

  Brendan left the room.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN / THURSDAY, 8:18 PM

  It was now twelve hours, give or take a few minutes, since Rebecca Heilshorn had been stabbed to death in her own bed. Or at least, the bed in a house owned by her family. Brendan realized that other than her previous relationship with smiling-Don Kettering and that the house was not in her name, he knew very little about the victim. Not a good spot to be in after an entire twelve hours. Granted, it had been a very eventful day, but now he had to deal with Internal Affairs and sit and explain the events at Olivia Jane’s house. A necessary part of police procedure, but a hassle, and counterproductive to his needs.

  Brendan lit a Marlboro and looked at the dreary street in Oriskany. The sun was setting and the shadow of the Sheriff’s Department draped itself across the pavement. Brendan stepped off the curb and walked out into the street where the low sun burst from between two buildings, spangling him in light. He closed his eyes and dragged on his cigarette. He mused, just for a moment, how cigarettes were less of a concern to him later in the day than they were when he smoked in the morning.

  He wished he had time to speak with Olivia, but IA was waiting for him upstairs. The sooner he got to them, the sooner it would be over. The Sheriff would be there, too.

  Brendan tossed away his cigarette and returned into the three-story, grey building.

  * * *

  On the third floor, Brendan spoke with Internal Affairs, one man and one woman, for over an hour. Sheriff Taber sat with his arms folded. He was the man who had hired Brendan, and watched the proceedings carefully. Not two months on the job and Healy was already involved in a shooting. It seemed unavoidable, and not the young detective’s fault, but then again, did the Sheriff have a cowboy on his hands? Taber was trim and fit, not exactly the picture of the rotund, bumbling Sheriff stereotype. He was a health-nut, coming to work in the morning with cereal bars instead of donuts. He worked out at the gym in the building three days a week. He was young for someone holding an elected position. Perhaps since he was 48, Taber’s relative youth had helped Brendan Healy get the job, since there wasn’t much more than ten years between them.

  “And then what happened?”

  The Q&A went on and on. The windows turned black as the sun set and night filled in. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Brendan could feel another headache coming on. He answered every question as plainly and articulately as he could. He left out no detail, but offered no speculation, unless it was solicited by IA. They didn’t seem to care much for his professional opinion on the whys and wherefores of the events surrounding the shooting of Kevin Heilshorn. They simply wanted to record the details, and evaluate the state of mind of the detective.

  At last the man and woman closed their red binders and stood up. They smiled and shook hands with Brendan, and then left him and the Sheriff alone.

  Taber headed to his desk. He had been sitting on a side couch and now he moved across the room with athletic power. Brendan wondered if Olivia Jane was still in the building. He doubted it. Then again, IA could be asking her a few questions, too. More likely though, they would get her statement from Deputy Benedetto and see if it gelled with Brendan’s own account of the gruesome afternoon.

  The Sheriff took his chair and looked across the desk at Brendan.

  “You did good.” Taber leaned forward, his chair squeaking, as if he was going to say more, when a figure appeared in the door to his office. It was just the dark shape of a man, obscured by the smoky glass. There was a tentative tap-tap.

  “Come in,” said Taber, and sat back.

  Delaney entered. He was holding a manila envelope.

  “How did it go?” He looked at the Sheriff while asking the question. The Sheriff held out his hand, gesturing that Brendan ought to answer.

  “Fine,” said Brendan.

  Delaney took the seat next to him. All three men looked at the envelope. Delaney seemed to let the moment linger, and then reached in and pulled out a book.

  “From the house,” he said. “It’s already been processed for latent prints, everything.”

  He handed it to Brendan. It was a copy of The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. Brendan held the book, turned it over, turned it back. It was a well-worn copy. He opened the cover and flipped through the first few pages. As he did, a small piece of paper dropped out.

  “Prints came back as the victim’s, and then a million others. It’s a book, after all. But the note is interesting.”

  Brendan read the note aloud. “ ‘Danice, May you be lifted up by the Lord. I love you, -K.’ ”

  “Oh boy,” said Taber.

  Delaney looked at the Sheriff with what Brendan thought was a certain smugness. “Read the passage.”

  Brendan looked at the page the slip of paper had bookmarked. A section was underlined in pencil. He lifted it closer to his face and read.

  “ ‘The truth is, that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set upon them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.’ ”

  The Sheriff furrowed his brow and wrinkled his nose, as if he had tasted something unpleasant and unfamiliar. “What does it mean?”

  Brendan answered him. “It means that whenever you have sex with someone you are linked to them for all time.”

  “It means,” said Delaney next, “That the victim, and her lover-boy brother Kevin, were doing the horizontal mambo, and then Kevin grew a conscience. Got religion, whatever.”

  “How do we know it’s Kevin?” asked Brendan.

  Delaney reached across the space between them and tapped the note Brendan was pressing to the book with his thumb. Delaney’s yellowed, clam-shell fingernail tapped the letter “K.”

  “Right there, Colombo. ‘K’ for Kevin.”

  “But it’s addressed to ‘Danice’.”

  “Yes. I can see that. ‘Danice’ in quotes. A nickname. A little pet name they used for her. Maybe it was so they could correspond about their escapades in secret. Or maybe it was the name of some teddy bear she had as a girl, who she used to have go down on her. Who cares?”

  “Maybe ‘K’ is a nickname too. It doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “Delaney,” interjected Taber. He spoke in a sober, fatherly tone. “Let’s please show respect for the
departed.”

  “And plus,” said Brendan, still arguing with Delaney, “it doesn’t make sense as a motive. If Kevin had found God and was looking to break things off, why kill Rebecca?”

  Delaney withdrew his hand, sat back, and shrugged. “He had opportunity. Okay? We’ve established that Kevin was in town, he checked into the Econolodge last night. This morning, he shows up within an hour of the body being discovered.”

  “Why would he come back?” asked the Sheriff. Brendan found he liked Taber more all the time.

  Delaney shrugged again. He reached into his inner breast pocket – he was still wearing the suit from that morning, likely stained with sweat – and pulled out a Ziploc bag filled with sunflower seeds. “Maybe he forgot something. Maybe he wanted to get caught. The way he acted with the deputies, you know. Suicide by cop, that sort of thing.”

  He popped a seed into his mouth and started making little chewing motions. “Motive? You know, I think this is one for the shrinks. For Olivia Jane, maybe. Once you get into the territory of incest and all of that . . . forget it. I’m lost.”

  Brendan felt annoyed. “But we still don’t have the report. We don’t know they’re blood related. We . . .”

  Delaney’s head whipped around to look at Brendan. “Yes we do. While you were sitting in here, I was on the phone to the lab. Deputy Coroner Clark has matched their blood types. They are both B negative. That’s the second rarest form of blood type. Plus, well, he said they bear a strong familial resemblance. So, there’s that.”

  “What about DNA?”

  Delaney narrowed his eyes. “Clark is fast, but nobody is that fast. Especially in a homicide. Come on, now. Typing won’t be determined until at least tomorrow, midday maybe. Don’t tell me this is your first rodeo.”

  Brendan ignored the barb. Delaney knew exactly how much experience he had, and what Brendan’s background was – Brendan had already been put on the spot earlier that day by Skene. Delaney was acting this way for the Sheriff’s benefit. Fine. It was late and he was exhausted and he decided to play a little hard ball.

  “I understand all about the process, just as I reminded Skene today. First there is the cleaning and decontamination of the work site. Documentation begins as soon as the evidence enters the work site, via the chain of custody. Clark has two bodies now, so that makes for extra quality control measures. The initial phase of body fluid screening can be tedious and time-consuming. I did assume, though, that your CSI unit on scene used the alternative light source to screen for any fluids?”

  Delaney spat out a seed casing into his hand, and looked at Brendan the way a hawk might regard a shrew. “They didn’t bring their ALS equipment, no. They’re not used to this kind of high-profile case. Clark showed up early, so there was no time.”

  “I know,” said Brendan coolly. “And I know you know that if there isn’t any biological material, there isn’t anything to test for DNA. But even if there wasn’t any semen or saliva for the rape kit swabs, there are other probative materials, like the bloodstains. My guess is that this is where Clark established the blood types. The PERK has indicated the victim has had a few partners – but I’ve heard nothing that says the victim was definitely raped this morning. And my guess is that you haven’t, either.”

  Delaney chewed. His face was now a mask to conceal his emotions. The Sheriff’s head ticked back and forth between the two of them, as if watching a tennis match. “Go on,” Delaney said.

  “Well, that body fluid screening usually only takes two or three hours. But let’s put a pin in that for now and come back to it. Isolating the DNA from the bloodstains would be next. The DNA differential extraction can take up to eight hours. Then there’s the quantitation using, if the lab is up to snuff, a real-time PCR technique. This takes minutes to hours, depending on the number of samples running on the instrument. So then the copied and tagged DNA is run through the 310 Genetic Analyzer. The whole thing can take two days of round-the-clock work by the forensic analysts. So no, Delaney, this is not my first rodeo.”

  Finished with his spiel, Brendan felt hot around his neck and ears. He wanted another cigarette. Instead, he looked down at the book in his hand, and at the handwritten note. He read the message again to himself, and then the passage, as Delaney and the Sheriff sat in a suspended awkward silence.

  Finally, Taber broke the ice. “So, when will you know if it was a rape?”

  Delaney opened his mouth, but Brendan cut in. “We would know by now. But it’s not conclusive yet.” He heard Delaney’s mouth shut with a clack of teeth.

  “You don’t think it’s rape,” said Taber.

  “I don’t think anything,” said Brendan. “The fact is, all we know is that a girl – maybe a girl who slept around – was murdered, and then her brother went Rambo and tried to kill me, or Olivia Jane, or us both. This neither makes him more a suspect or less so, in my opinion. This makes him a very tragic young man. But I haven’t even had the time yet to look at the victim. Who she was, or anything about her other than some hearsay. And if she was promiscuous, that only widens our search. The fact is, Sheriff Taber, this book, and this note, with their riddles, exemplifies where we’re at right now.”

  “Which is?”

  Brendan jerked his head toward Delaney. “Despite what he says, we’re in the dark.”

  Brendan plucked the manila envelope from Taber’s desk, where Delaney had set it down. He carefully slid the book and note back into it, and folded the flap down. Then he stood up.

  “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to go home. Just for an hour. Just to take a breath. Then I’ll be back to work on this.”

  The Sheriff nodded. Brendan didn’t look at Delaney. It seemed that in one day, the senior investigator had gone from mentor to antagonist. Brendan knew the hour and the stresses of the day had finally gotten to him, and he was likely taking things too personally. There was no evading his emotions now, though, he needed to leave. He slipped out of the Sheriff’s office, and headed out of the building.

  * * *

  Outside, the night held some of the day’s heat, but the air was cooling. In the parking lot at the back of the building, he saw Olivia Jane getting into her car, and it stopped him in his tracks. His heart did a double-beat.

  He started walking towards her again. She looked up and saw him approaching.

  Brendan imagined a scenario in his head:

  She says, What a frigging day. You want to get a drink?

  He says, I don’t drink. But I’ll get a coffee with you.

  She agrees and off they go.

  But as he drew closer to her, Olivia Jane offered the detective a wan smile, and then dropped out of sight as she settled into her car. She looked like she had been crying. Her door shut and the engine started up and he stopped.

  She backed out of the space, the car jerked into forward gear, and she pulled away.

  He caught one last glimpse of her. She was focused straight ahead, and didn’t turn to look at him.

  She drove off, and Brendan stood in the dark parking lot, the manila envelope in his hands.

  CHAPTER TWELVE / THURSDAY, 10:55 PM

  Brendan lived in the small community of Stanwix. The Sheriff’s Department in Oriskany was smack in between the small cities of Rome and Utica. Stanwix was close to Rome, about three miles from his office in Oriskany. He rented a two bedroom house on Toni Hill Road. It was a small colonial-style home, with a red door, and a whitewashed fence in front. Not the ideal trappings, but he’d taken it on the fly.

  The job offer to work as an investigator for Oneida County had come out of the sheer blue. Seamus Argon, a lifelong beat cop in Hawthorne, had told Brendan about it one morning on road patrol.

  Brendan had been doubtful. “Investigator? I’ve got three years as a cop in Hawthorne. I went to school for neurobiology, for Chrissakes, Argon. How am I going to make detective? I’d need at least two or three years in the civil office, or a stint on patrol before they even considered me.”


  But Argon was insistent. He had just heard about the opening for an investigator in Oneida, specifically someone who was skilled at going door to door. “You’re good with people,” said Argon.

  “I am?”

  Argon was in his mid-fifties. When it all came out, he knew the Sheriff, and could pull strings. Brendan thought about it for two days – that was all the time Argon said he would have.

  “You trying to get rid of me?”

  Argon was a large man with a flat Irish-cop face (though the fact that he was Scottish was something the hardened cop liked to remind Brendan about) and a no-nonsense attitude. He claimed to possess a bullshit detector to rival a Geiger counter. One tremor of BS, and his sensitive instrument picked it up readily. “You hate it here,” said Argon.

  “How do I hate it here?”

  But Argon only raised his eyebrows, and both men knew he was right. Not that loving where you lived was a prerequisite for any job. In this case, there was more to it. Brendan was haunted. He looked at his own hangdog face in the mirror every morning and knew it. Argon had become his best friend, even his mentor, but the sight of the man constantly reminded Brendan of the day his entire life had changed. The day he had privately come to think of as The Reckoning.

  “Domestic disturbances and speed traps are where I belong, not you,” Argon had said at last.

  They’d been sitting in the cruiser on Elmwood Ave. Brendan remembered the day with startling clarity. It had been the tail end of winter, and icy rain had spacked against the windshield. Argon, who never liked to turn the heat up in the car, had been sitting in the driver’s seat with a steaming cup of coffee, his skin ruddy in the cold, his thick red mustache twitching as he spoke.

  “You’ve watched every aspect of the investigations we’ve been around. Your head is in the detective work, my friend. Plus, all your background peering into microscopes and all that fuckin’ shit. Now this position, though, this is primarily for questioning the witnesses, getting statements. The big shit up there is an old codger named Delaney. It’s the Sheriff’s county, but Delaney thinks it’s his. He’s a nice enough guy, unless you get in the way of his agenda. He likes his pussy, too, pardon my fran-swaz, so he’s gotten himself into trouble once or twice and is on thin ice with the department. He’s got the hots for the ADA, maybe the staff shrink, whatever wears a skirt and stands upright. If IA ever comes around, you’ll see Delaney lick his palms and slick his hair back. The deps and the local PDs are gonna go door to door, too, just like we’ve done. But they had some case up there not long ago with major blowback because of how some dumb cop like us blew it getting an accurate statement from a witness, and it ended up a ragged case for the DA, who let this guy walk. Guy ended up killing someone a few weeks later. So you’ve got Delaney with something to prove, and the Senior Prosecutor, I think he’s called Skene, with a wild hair up his ass, too. You’ll be on the outside up there, but keep your head down and do the job. The Sheriff will have your back, and that’s all that matters.”