Page 13 of Go Now
‘I don’t have a fiancée,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’she asked angrily.Then added, more gently, ‘I had an idea something was up.What’s happened?’
‘I’m… look, I’m not blocking you out,’ he said.‘We’re partners.And I will talk about it.But can we not do it here, now?’
‘Okay.Whenever you like.But don’t bottle it up, Marcus.I don’t need you going crazy on me because you’ve got girl troubles.’
'It's more than that,' he said, glumly, then picked up his phone.Within seconds, he was wisecracking with Chen, as if the conversation had never happened.Men were a mystery.Strike that,Marcuswas a mystery.And what had happened with Cheryl?Kate had still not met her, but somehow she couldn’t imagine Marcus without her.
Chen was with them in seconds, smelling of the rain.She ordered coffee and a slice of chocolate cake, an odd choice, Kate thought, for breakfast.But it possibly wasn’t her breakfast.
‘We just got the PM results. Cause of death was BFT, blunt force trauma.Repeated blows with an irregularly shaped heavy object.Tiny traces of mica and quartz in the occipital cavity suggest it was Manhattanschist, the same type of rock as the scattered stones, of which there were nine.Estimates are that it was a single item weighing up to twenty pounds, which would take considerable upper-body strength to wield.From the angle of the strikes, the killer straddled the prone body of the victim and struck down, like so…DOOF!'Alongside the sound effects, she mimicked the action with her coffee spoon, prompting a few concerned looks from fellow diners.
‘How did he get them to lie down?’Kate wondered.
‘Coming to that,’ said Chen, who sipped her coffee and grimaced.It was a strange thing about New York: everyone drank pints of coffee every day.But nobody knew how to make it.Not in a truly drinkable form, anyway.‘Victim’s blood contained a small quantity of alcohol – equivalent to a couple shots of bourbon – trace amount of cannabis – he had a vape pen in one of his drawers – and a significant amount of BHC, betahydroxycurarin, administered as a vapor. That’s a first for me.’
‘What is it?’Marcus asked.
'It's a paralyzing agent, used as part of an anaesthesiologist's daily kit since the Fifties. It's an analog these days but up until the Eighties, it could only be harvested from the curare plant, deep in the Amazon rain forest.Local tribes put it on their arrows for hunting. It would have left Mr.Ashworth unable to move, yet entirely conscious.Ultimately, had nothing else happened to him and no help came, the BHC would have killed him, because it suppresses the respiratory system last, and due to cellular differences, it does so relatively slowly.But in this case, someone bashed his brains out before that could happen.'
‘Is it commonly administered as a vapor?’
‘Occasionally, in cases where a patient’s veins are shot, or they have clotting problems.Hospitals may keep a small stock. So we’re looking to see if any has gone missing over the last five years as well as talking to the manufacturers and distributors.Also trying to pinpoint any inner-city areas where there’s been deep excavation over the past year.He might have picked his rocks up from a building site.’
‘This is a sadist,’ Kate said, mostly to herself, thinking of the victim lying there, unable to move, trapped within the body being killed.It made her shudder.‘Someone who enjoys it all. Enjoys the weakness and incapacity of the victim. Maybe he tells them what he’s going to do before he does it. Kills them close up, almost intimately, so that he doesn’t miss a detail.It might be the nearest he comes to another human being.The straddling is almost sexual.I don’t imagine he has a partner.There might be someone who doesn’t ask awkward questions, like a bed-ridden parent, but this guy doesn’t strike me as a carer… What about the time-frame?’
‘Couldn’t improve on my half-two to four estimate. We’ll check if there’s any operational CCTV in the area from one to six,’ Chen said.‘I’ve got a couple of trainees at a loose end.What are you two doing today?Empire State Building?Staten Island ferry?
‘Funny,’ Marcus responded.‘I’ll be trying to build up a profile of the victim through the people closest to him.’
‘And I’ll be looking at threats and protests over the last few years,’ said Kate.
‘One of my boots can help with that,’ Chen said.‘C’mon, it’s grunt-work.’
Kate looked at Marcus.Broadening the team increased the risk of things leaking, of them getting caught up in managing the media instead of cracking the case.But who looked a gift horse in the mouth?
‘Thanks,’ Kate said.‘Appreciate that.’
It felt good to have an ally in Chen.But Kate couldn’t fight the growing sense that it didn’t matter. If the killer was as twisted as he or she seemed to be, then Kate didn’t need a helpful pair of hands. She’d need an army of her own.
++++++
Marcus took the subway up to Williamsburg, welcoming the breeze that assaulted him as soon as he made it back to ground level.He wasn’t a health freak, but there was something about that subterranean air… It was just other people’s breath, wasn’t it, moving from one set of lungs to another, forever?No way it could be good.
The weak morning sun bounced off the chrome signage and the glass storefronts that lined the street, and he stopped for a moment, taking it all in.Back when he was a kid, getting into mischief on the streets of Bensonhurst, he'd rarely ventured this far north. There might have been a few artists toughing it out in Williamsburg at the time – plenty of big old buildings nobody wanted - but the area hadn't been hip, just dangerous, gang-town.Meanwhile, down in Bensonhurst, he and his little crew of Italian and Irish friends might have walked with a swagger and copied the wiseguy routines they saw on TV, but they'd all, basically, been good kids, growing up in relative safety and protected by a strong community.If you strayed over the line for whatever reason – stealing vodka from the Russian graves in the cemetery, flying love-notes over the convent school wall, disguised as paper aeroplanes - then a hundred percent someone saw you, and that someone knew your Mom or your priest or your teacher, and you were cooked.
He wondered, now, why he’d been so keen to get away.Perhaps it had beentoosafe for an adventurous boy with a lot of energy.Easy to say that, when you’d never experienced real danger.Once you did… It changed everything. And you couldn’t change back.
But today's Williamsburg, he thought, as he carried on down the street, was almost a parody of itself.Food trucks selling snacks at a price he still associated with a sit-down dinner, people sipping oat milk lattes, a lone juggler trying to draw a crowd in spite of the wind.Shops with one shoe in the window and young men with phenomenal facial hair.The 'burg was seriously pretentious, but he'd take pretentious a thousand times over in preference to war-torn, starving, divided, smashed to bits by bombs and bullets and bad ideas.
He moved with purpose, weaving through the crowd, his destination scribbled on his hand.He was expecting premises with exposed brickwork, tinted windows, a neon sculpture, something achingly cool, with a receptionist to match.Instead, sandwiched between a vegan bakery and a shop apparently selling unicycles, there was a nondescript, whale-colored front door.There were three bells to the side.He pressed the one that said ‘Crendell Agency’.
Up a narrow flight of stairs to the first floor and he found himself in a small, cluttered office.Kathy Crendell, Brandon Ashworth’s agent and former partner stood in the doorway, a ginger cat in her arms.
‘Sorry, are you allergic?’she asked, in a rich Texan drawl.‘She can’t see, so she likes to sniff everyone who comes in.’
‘She can sniff away,’ Marcus said.‘What’s her name?’
