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Pursuit In Death - Chapter 3
Posted by
miche405
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03 September 2012
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Eve was crouched over what was left of the front door when Peabody finally arrived on scene.
“EMT said they had to blow the door to get in,” Eve told her partner. “And here you can see that someone messed with the lock plate...some amateur based on the damage.”
Dallas and Peabody used department issue Seal-It on their hands and their shoes. They engaged their recorders and proceeded into the apartment.
There was a coating of fire retardant foam over everything. But the fire damage was still clearly visible. The air was equally thick with smoke and the fumes of spent chemicals.
It was obvious that the fire had been set deliberately. Eve dug out her temperature gauges to confirm that the area she suspected was indeed where the fire had initiated. Based on how close it was to the front door, it suggested a desire to trap someone or something in the unit.
They found the woman’s body on the floor to the rear of the apartment. The position of the corpse indicated that she had tried to get to the fire escape. Since that exit had been compromised in a manner similar to the front door, she had succumbed to the smoke.
As the junior officer, Peabody set about identifying the victim. A task made much easier by the lack of physical trauma to the body.
“Wells, Honey Ann. DOB: September 23rd, 2034. Occupation: Registered Nurse. Houston Street Hospice. Employed: Four years. Parents: Wells, Clive William and Faizo, Joann Lourdes. Deceased. Natural Causes. Siblings: One. Male. Wells, Francis Dion. Wells, Honey Ann has no record. No warrants. No priors.”
“Jesus,” Eve said. “Honey? Honey?? Who would name a grown-assed woman Honey? You’d half expect her brother to be named...Jam.... And speaking of which: Francis Wells? Why does that name seem so familiar?”
Peabody continued her records search on her comm-link. “It was just a baby-sized ass when they named her.... And you probably recognize Francis because you had him bobbing for soy chips yesterday.”
The deceased and the kitchen worker were related. Honey had been holed up in an abandoned building across the alley from where her brother worked. Things were starting to fall into place.
“Stevens,” Eve murmured, “is escalating. He’s killing people now.”
“Now?” Peabody could not believe her ears. “Dallas, did you forget you’ve got a murder board full of people Stevens killed?”
Eve took the time to explain to her partner that this was Stevens’ first real kill. Yes, he was responsible for all of the Kick deaths. But this time he had taken an active role in ending a life. It had to mean something. Stevens had walked away from many of his previous “girlfriends” to stay ahead of the law. But never before had he harmed any of them.
“Give me everything you can find on Wells and Stevens, Peabody. Go all the way back. There is a connection between those two. Find it. It’s why she’s dead.”
Eve took a slow walk around the room as she looked at the evidence with a different eye.
“He didn’t mean to kill her,” she said abruptly. “He was trying to scare her and it all got out of hand. Who reported this fire...? Record shows it was an emergency call placed by an unidentified male.... Call was made from a throwaway link.” Dallas was on a roll. “Okay. So for some reason he needs to scare this woman. He sets a fire and blocks her in the apartment. She has something on him...he needed her cooperation. But Stevens has only ever dealt illegals before. He doesn’t really know what he is doing here.... He accidentally damages the locks when he blocked the doors. He probably wasn’t even aware this building had automated fire retardation. It’s an abandoned building...you wouldn’t expect it to have that. So he has her in there, maybe he gets what he wants, maybe he doesn’t, but the thing is...she can’t get out and he can’t get in. He panics and runs away. But he still calls it in.”
Peabody was amazed. She and Dallas were in the same room and had looked at the same evidence. Yet Peabody hadn’t seen half of what her partner had. Maybe someday soon she would. She could only hope.
Eve was back in her office at Cop Central. She stretched as she grabbed herself yet another cup of coffee. She was now into her thirtieth hour. If you didn’t count the fourteen-minute nap ̶̶ and with that many hours on the job, you never counted the naps. Eve could and would sleep later but for now the case was coming together.
It had taken some digging but it turned out that Stevens and Wells likely had crossed paths in college. Wells had graduated with an extended Degree in Chemistry and a minor Medical Degree. Stevens, during his tenure, had bounced around from program to program. He’d left school with partial credits in Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, Business and Computers. At this point it would be near impossible to establish for certain that Stevens and Wells had known each other. But they’d both been active members in a couple of the same campus extra-curriculars and that was enough for now.
What Dallas found puzzling was Wells’ work at the Hospice on Houston Street. At best, Honey was providing medical care to sidewalk sleepers. A far cry from the fortune and better lifestyle she could have attained had she made use of her Chemistry degrees.
A quick call to the Hospice showed Honey to have an excellent record of service. But the Director of Operations indicated that he had not expected her to last much longer there. She seemed to get far too attached to the patients and took it almost personally when they passed. As the director pointed out: sidewalk sleepers were rarely in the best of health to begin with and generally wouldn’t show up at the Hospice until they were already too far gone. Honey, he concluded, had been very popular among the homeless.
Wells’ financial data was finally accessed. She had had far more money than she should have based on her meagre Hospice salary. Definitely, she’d had a second income. How else could she have afforded the ultra-modern apartment she’d rented on the Upper East Side?
The question was, what had Wells been doing in that abandoned building in Spanish Harlem?
For the second time in as many days, Eve was in constant contact with Feeney’s geek squad. The EDD was going through all of Honey’s electronics: her home unit, her pocket link and her PPC. It took the squad longer than Eve would have liked to crack Honey’s pass-codes, but when they did, they turned up a wealth of information.
They found the formula for Kick and for all of the versions that preceded the final product.
Wells had kept excellent records detailing her test subjects’ responses to her trial formulas. It didn’t take Eve long to deduce that these subjects were the sidewalk sleepers whom Honey had worked with at the Hospice. Clearly, she’d “lost” a lot of them during the drug’s early days.
The journal entries explicitly detailed the partnership between Stevens and Wells. Spelled it out so thoroughly that Eve almost did a booty-dance when the information appeared on the screens in her office.
Eve loved it when perps weren’t smart enough to use aliases. Although in Honey’s case, it might have been the scientist in her that made her keep such detailed and factually accurate documentation.
Eve could now prove that Wells had created the formula for Kick and Stevens had distributed the drug through his club network.
Honey’s journal showed exactly when Stevens had started pressuring her to adjust the formula. He’d wanted to speed up production and several more Houston Street residents gave up their lives in the pursuit of science and greed. The formula variation, the one that would become the Death Kick, had initially showed the most promise.
The journal also revealed that Stevens had hacked into Wells’ PPC as a result; the new formula had hit the streets before Honey could complete her testing.
EDD also uncovered several electronic and voice messages sent from Wells to Stevens. Furious, Honey had demanded the new formula be taken off the streets.
Eve couldn’t understand it: the woman was an enigma. She’d been fine with the deaths of numerous street sleepers killed in the name of science, but could not stomach the deaths of the urban professionals or the children.
It appeared that Stevens and Wells had come to an agreement to stop production and go underground. They’d planned to slip out of the city and set up elsewhere.
But clearly Honey had finally realized she could no longer trust her partner. Her last journal entry stated that she had hidden the remaining cache of the drug. She’d planned to destroy the lot before she and Stevens slithered out of town.
“EMT said they had to blow the door to get in,” Eve told her partner. “And here you can see that someone messed with the lock plate...some amateur based on the damage.”
Dallas and Peabody used department issue Seal-It on their hands and their shoes. They engaged their recorders and proceeded into the apartment.
There was a coating of fire retardant foam over everything. But the fire damage was still clearly visible. The air was equally thick with smoke and the fumes of spent chemicals.
It was obvious that the fire had been set deliberately. Eve dug out her temperature gauges to confirm that the area she suspected was indeed where the fire had initiated. Based on how close it was to the front door, it suggested a desire to trap someone or something in the unit.
They found the woman’s body on the floor to the rear of the apartment. The position of the corpse indicated that she had tried to get to the fire escape. Since that exit had been compromised in a manner similar to the front door, she had succumbed to the smoke.
As the junior officer, Peabody set about identifying the victim. A task made much easier by the lack of physical trauma to the body.
“Wells, Honey Ann. DOB: September 23rd, 2034. Occupation: Registered Nurse. Houston Street Hospice. Employed: Four years. Parents: Wells, Clive William and Faizo, Joann Lourdes. Deceased. Natural Causes. Siblings: One. Male. Wells, Francis Dion. Wells, Honey Ann has no record. No warrants. No priors.”
“Jesus,” Eve said. “Honey? Honey?? Who would name a grown-assed woman Honey? You’d half expect her brother to be named...Jam.... And speaking of which: Francis Wells? Why does that name seem so familiar?”
Peabody continued her records search on her comm-link. “It was just a baby-sized ass when they named her.... And you probably recognize Francis because you had him bobbing for soy chips yesterday.”
The deceased and the kitchen worker were related. Honey had been holed up in an abandoned building across the alley from where her brother worked. Things were starting to fall into place.
“Stevens,” Eve murmured, “is escalating. He’s killing people now.”
“Now?” Peabody could not believe her ears. “Dallas, did you forget you’ve got a murder board full of people Stevens killed?”
Eve took the time to explain to her partner that this was Stevens’ first real kill. Yes, he was responsible for all of the Kick deaths. But this time he had taken an active role in ending a life. It had to mean something. Stevens had walked away from many of his previous “girlfriends” to stay ahead of the law. But never before had he harmed any of them.
“Give me everything you can find on Wells and Stevens, Peabody. Go all the way back. There is a connection between those two. Find it. It’s why she’s dead.”
Eve took a slow walk around the room as she looked at the evidence with a different eye.
“He didn’t mean to kill her,” she said abruptly. “He was trying to scare her and it all got out of hand. Who reported this fire...? Record shows it was an emergency call placed by an unidentified male.... Call was made from a throwaway link.” Dallas was on a roll. “Okay. So for some reason he needs to scare this woman. He sets a fire and blocks her in the apartment. She has something on him...he needed her cooperation. But Stevens has only ever dealt illegals before. He doesn’t really know what he is doing here.... He accidentally damages the locks when he blocked the doors. He probably wasn’t even aware this building had automated fire retardation. It’s an abandoned building...you wouldn’t expect it to have that. So he has her in there, maybe he gets what he wants, maybe he doesn’t, but the thing is...she can’t get out and he can’t get in. He panics and runs away. But he still calls it in.”
Peabody was amazed. She and Dallas were in the same room and had looked at the same evidence. Yet Peabody hadn’t seen half of what her partner had. Maybe someday soon she would. She could only hope.
*****
Eve was back in her office at Cop Central. She stretched as she grabbed herself yet another cup of coffee. She was now into her thirtieth hour. If you didn’t count the fourteen-minute nap ̶̶ and with that many hours on the job, you never counted the naps. Eve could and would sleep later but for now the case was coming together.
It had taken some digging but it turned out that Stevens and Wells likely had crossed paths in college. Wells had graduated with an extended Degree in Chemistry and a minor Medical Degree. Stevens, during his tenure, had bounced around from program to program. He’d left school with partial credits in Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, Business and Computers. At this point it would be near impossible to establish for certain that Stevens and Wells had known each other. But they’d both been active members in a couple of the same campus extra-curriculars and that was enough for now.
What Dallas found puzzling was Wells’ work at the Hospice on Houston Street. At best, Honey was providing medical care to sidewalk sleepers. A far cry from the fortune and better lifestyle she could have attained had she made use of her Chemistry degrees.
A quick call to the Hospice showed Honey to have an excellent record of service. But the Director of Operations indicated that he had not expected her to last much longer there. She seemed to get far too attached to the patients and took it almost personally when they passed. As the director pointed out: sidewalk sleepers were rarely in the best of health to begin with and generally wouldn’t show up at the Hospice until they were already too far gone. Honey, he concluded, had been very popular among the homeless.
*****
Wells’ financial data was finally accessed. She had had far more money than she should have based on her meagre Hospice salary. Definitely, she’d had a second income. How else could she have afforded the ultra-modern apartment she’d rented on the Upper East Side?
The question was, what had Wells been doing in that abandoned building in Spanish Harlem?
For the second time in as many days, Eve was in constant contact with Feeney’s geek squad. The EDD was going through all of Honey’s electronics: her home unit, her pocket link and her PPC. It took the squad longer than Eve would have liked to crack Honey’s pass-codes, but when they did, they turned up a wealth of information.
They found the formula for Kick and for all of the versions that preceded the final product.
Wells had kept excellent records detailing her test subjects’ responses to her trial formulas. It didn’t take Eve long to deduce that these subjects were the sidewalk sleepers whom Honey had worked with at the Hospice. Clearly, she’d “lost” a lot of them during the drug’s early days.
The journal entries explicitly detailed the partnership between Stevens and Wells. Spelled it out so thoroughly that Eve almost did a booty-dance when the information appeared on the screens in her office.
Eve loved it when perps weren’t smart enough to use aliases. Although in Honey’s case, it might have been the scientist in her that made her keep such detailed and factually accurate documentation.
Eve could now prove that Wells had created the formula for Kick and Stevens had distributed the drug through his club network.
Honey’s journal showed exactly when Stevens had started pressuring her to adjust the formula. He’d wanted to speed up production and several more Houston Street residents gave up their lives in the pursuit of science and greed. The formula variation, the one that would become the Death Kick, had initially showed the most promise.
The journal also revealed that Stevens had hacked into Wells’ PPC as a result; the new formula had hit the streets before Honey could complete her testing.
EDD also uncovered several electronic and voice messages sent from Wells to Stevens. Furious, Honey had demanded the new formula be taken off the streets.
Eve couldn’t understand it: the woman was an enigma. She’d been fine with the deaths of numerous street sleepers killed in the name of science, but could not stomach the deaths of the urban professionals or the children.
It appeared that Stevens and Wells had come to an agreement to stop production and go underground. They’d planned to slip out of the city and set up elsewhere.
But clearly Honey had finally realized she could no longer trust her partner. Her last journal entry stated that she had hidden the remaining cache of the drug. She’d planned to destroy the lot before she and Stevens slithered out of town.
