Chapter 4
And this was the grave issue: Erik Lehnsherr was a liar.
Police officers weren’t supposed to lie. They were supposed to look grim when they approached families and say in stony voices, Sir, we’re sorry for your loss, and genuinely mean it. They were supposed to have their chests punched out when the press ran around demanding the news on a case that had turned into wildfire, media fodder. They ought to have a high school graduation certificate too.
Erik Lehnsherr exhibited none of the prerequisites of being a good detective. He did possess, however, a leather jacket that fit him quite well, and a look on his face that was not kind or intimidating or anything at all—the blankness of it, the lack of humanity, that was what made people clear their throats, tuck their hair behind their ears, scuttle back to the darkened corners from whence they came.
He used to think the cigarettes made him scarier, but it actually got him into Hollywood’s TOP 10 HOTTEST DETECTIVES (why the fuck such a rating existed was anyone’s guess). It played a minor role in him quitting; mostly it was the way Mags plucked the tobacco out of his fingers and kissed him on the lips. No more of this if you smell like a sewer, and Erik had obliged like an eager dog.
That was what women did to him, Erik supposed. Except Grey. And Charles.
Charles?
The red bull was getting to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten something, and in assent his stomach growled, gnawing into itself. Erik got off his desk, stabbed a pin into his corkboard and went to Dunkin Donuts next door to buy himself a half dozen croquettes. He shoved them down systematically. The level of enjoyment was about the same as what he experienced by doing laundry.
The issue was also that Erik had uncharted thoughts in his head. Not about the cases, because the analytical part of him had been sapped dry by the Maple Killer business he’d been poring through the whole morning. And they had a lead in any case: the kid’s name, one Andy Shaw, tipped by neighbors of the boy when the newspaper landed on their porches earlier. Erik had enquired deeper and gotten an address on the Shaw estate, and he’d be heading there once Nur decided to show up. Law enforcement had beaten some order into him. Also, he was one dot off from being suspended.
So the thoughts, the strange ones, were about the professor. The day before he was supposed to board a plane; the lingering touch on Erik’s jaw, spikes of gingery facial hair yielding under his fingers. When he got home, it was to the furrowed worry between Mags’s brows. You have that disturbed look on you. It was disturbing; Charles was, the way he made Erik forget everything about himself, the molecules of his body dissipating until it was just the red mouth, the pearly flash of his nape, synapse and sinew.
Erik got his cellphone out and dialed to D.I. Grey. It rang for a solid minute before falling off, and took Erik two more tries before Jean finally picked up.
“What’s cricket flour?”
Erik paused. Contemplated the question.
“Is it necessary that I answer this to talk about a case?”
“No. If you knew the answer you would’ve said it anyway.” There was some rustling at the end of the line—things being thrown into a shopping cart, which was a wholly novel image to attach to Jean. She didn’t have the sort of family face that warranted grocery shopping, or a face that warranted anything besides locking people behind bars. “They’re supposed to be sustainable according to the package. See, you need to know these things, Lehnsherr. One day some hooligan will use it to wipe off blood stains, and then where will you be?”
At a retirement home, Erik thought grimly. He knew he was kidding himself, though. The job would sooner kill him than see him at peace with the world.
“Maple is back,” he said. A woman who worked in sexual assault passed by, carrying a Strawberry Frosted to the table next to his.
The news gave even Jean a pause. She imposed a strict regulation against herself to not watch or read the news during vacations—the one time she did, she’d rushed back after just a few hours in Nicaragua.
“Well,” she said after a long silence. Cash registers were beeping on her end of the line and some kid was screaming, daddy, I want that one! And then for some reason Erik was thinking about his own dad, or rather his absence for a large part of his adolescence. They had a low table set on the balcony where he slept most days. Lines of cocaine, lampposts flickering yellow in the black, black pupils of his eyes.
“We’ve got a suspect. I’ll keep you updated on things.”
“Erik.”
And then winter was coming back in full force, a squall of snow tearing at his face. Rooms that housed cockroaches in Poland; Erik curled up among them, speckles of black in his eyes, waiting for something.
Jean was there. She’d pulled him onto his two feet, placed her thumbs over his temple and made him focus. Erik, Erik, look at me. Blood under her fingernails. But Erik hadn’t let anyone touch the bodies.
It was cold outside. Erik was suddenly aware of this fact yet again. He glanced at his watch, 1.30p.m., and remembered it was January. A little over a year.
“Yeah, I know.” And then he hung up.
*
Nur got Erik to take Quested with him.
It was a feat in itself. Erik hadn’t worked with anyone since John got killed on duty. The narc game was analogous to having your toes in quick sand—John’s feelers were attuned to it, could sense that he was getting sucked in too deep when he asked for the department change. Too little too late.
Erik didn’t know him that well but he’d liked the guy in spite of his nail biting habits—and that was no small accomplishment for him. But they found his body on the shores so long ago, years before Maple, before the winter that had split his life into two. All Erik had when John’s name cropped up in conversations was a numb splinter in his chest, a vague recognition that he was a good man in the way that all dead men were.
There were two kinds of people in this world, the big CEOs who slapped Armani-scented business cards on everyone’s faces and the ones whose cards were slipped under tables, dog-eared and creased, like relics from an ancient civilization. The Shaw residence was nestled in a neighborhood that was wealthily silent, a collage of people who had enough money that they didn’t need to interact with society to survive. The problem was that the quiet ones always had something to hide.
Quested drove. Erik had one hand out of the window, a habit from smoking that he was conscious of but committed anyway. If he was going to bring the newbie around, he’d at least take a moment to rest his eyes.
There was something sweet in the air that Erik couldn’t discern. The body came back to him, a fresh puzzle piece. The maple, carnage, feet crunching on the malaise condition of mankind. Autumn was passing or he was passing autumn. The world was always a frozen winter landscape, but his heart, it was with the rotten apples and soggy milk cartons of gilded brown sunsets. It was autumn in Poland when they first met, and it was autumn in America when she left.
“Mr. Lehnsherr?”
Erik was looking at his phone now, Charles’s number saved in it. There was a triple six at the end of the number—an unaccountably professorial thing to do.
Quested had parked outside of the Shaw mansion. It loomed over the other buildings, though in a smart way that utilized the pine trees instead of bricks. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a beach and sea stretched out from the backyard and that the Shaws would ride a yacht to Cuba in the summer, a perfectly white family, mom, dad, Andrew and Jennifer. No, the fluted French pillars were screaming Henry and Seraphina.
“The Sultan’s brother has a yacht with two speedboats: Nipple I and Nipple II.”
The car beeped. Quested stared at his senior detective. “I’m sorry, Sir?”
Erik laughed. Retirement? Go fuck yourself with a fistful of that cricket flour, Jean.
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
Being around Erik was difficult sometimes. Quested did his best with the blank face they taught him to wear in his academy days.
The two men walked up to the massive gate, looking for some kind of buzzer to ring. There was none and Erik could hardly see a slider, a lock, or anything that suggested the gate could be opened or closed. The whole ordeal was whiter than the KKK, but then a speaker came alive under the dead rosemary bushes.
“Police,” Erik began before the speaker could. “We’re here to speak to Mr. Sebastian Shaw.”
“You’re speaking to him.”
Erik and Quested exchanged a look.
“It’s about your son, Andy Shaw,” Quested said.
The procedure was to say we’re very sorry to inform you that your son has passed away, and then there would be the painfully stretched-out moment of time while the news sunk in, and then tears welling, the occasional pot being thrown across the room. But Andy’s death had been all over breaking news since the night before.
The gate opened somehow by the time Erik had snapped out of his reverie. The gut-wrenching pain hit him at the strangest of times. He could be turning on the tap or fixing the doorknob when he remembered he had a family, once, one hand in each of his, pointing out of an airplane window while Wand’s frazzled hair smacked him in the face, vibrant red, just like his when he was younger.
Erik had the sudden urge to run in and beat the shit out of Mr. Sebastian Shaw, but he knew it’d pass. Everything passes, according to Dr. Moira. It was the only indisputable truth in this world.
Erik’s blood was freezing by the time they got to the front door of the Shaw mansion. There were golf cars parked by the pine trees that looked like museum installations, part and parcel of the dreary snow. It was very white indeed, this residence, and not because of the climate. Something that had to do with high society parties, Xanax in champagne, whole roasted pigs and sliced thighs.
The door opened. Manually, with limb attached to the gilded handle and a head attached to a body. It even bore a face!
“Good day, gentlemen. May I help you?”
Erik didn’t meet Quested’s gaze this time. He had his head down, burrowing in the ridiculous pink scarf wrapped around his neck. It was the fashion statement he kept in a cupboard below his desk, the one he only got out for serious cases.
It worked; Sebastian was clearly taken aback by the sight of it.
“Andy Shaw is your son, isn’t he?”
Everything was happening backwards. Quested’s words were the ones Erik pulled out only at the very end of a visit, when he knew he was talking to his killer.
Sebastian stepped aside to let them in, his eyes still pinned to the scarf. When he turned away to gesture to the living room, Erik shot Quested a sharp look. Take the opportunity. The kid was smarter than what he gave him credit for; as Erik got into Sebastian’s stride, he lingered back, taking in every inch of the haughty chandelier and the Bengal tiger carpet, poring through the home for any sign of foul play.
“Nice tapestry,” Erik offered. This wasn’t a typical phrase from the handbook, but this wasn’t a typical murder either.
Sebastian sat diagonally across, on the most ornate of the twelve chairs furnishing the room. The only noise was the crackling of fire from some distant hearth, certainly not from the same room, maybe even speaker synthesized. Forget the Cuban holiday—Erik suspected that the last time Sebastian had stepped out of this mansion was during his teenage years, when he still had a soul. The man clearly didn’t possess one if he had so many acres to his name and no one around to try and take it from him.
It came through in the way he looked, too, though Erik didn’t like using appearances to judge whether he was talking to a killer. That tactic only worked to a certain degree, for the accidental alcohol-induced murderers and the angry spouses, the ones who frayed at the end of his questioning. Sebastian, he was different. Soft-spoken, oriental with eyes that looked a little like a Komodo dragon, but he was white all over from the gloves to his hair to the scepter—goddamn, who still brandished those around in this day and age?—like a priest, freshly christened, absconding from his sins.
Not Maple. Not yet, but Erik could see the potential.
“Would your friend like to sit as well?” Sebastian said. “So we may talk.”
Quested turned from the window he was pretending to look at. Sebastian could smell the young blood in him, a cadet who hasn’t felt the noose around his throat. Erik ought to have put Quested outside after all, where he could bitch about it to Nur and get them both discharged.
Erik could really use a smoke.
“Sit,” Erik grunted, smearing his oily palm onto his face. Quested sat.
“Now I suppose you will begin,” Sebastian sat back on his chair, the emerald eyes of his raven glittering on the scepter. “By asking me, dear Sir, why was the case of your Andy Shaw, who according to neighbors went missing some three days back, not reported? And I, gentlemen, would answer in a stuttering voice with some vague explanation that I was out of town, oh, working,you know how it is.”
Erik and Quested were silent.
“No. No, I won’t have this,” Sebastian hummed. His eyebrows were all the way up on his forehead now, and he wasn’t blushing with anger or heat or anything, really. He was just too white and clean for it. “You will speak to my lawyer. Good day, Sirs.”
Erik crossed his arms and leaned forward on the table. “You realize that you’re shooting yourself in the foot?”
Sebastian tapped his scepter on the ground. “Ah, but that’s the catch. I can’t walk well, you see, I have a limp.”
“Incredibly well concealed.”
“Some things are meant to be concealed.”
Sebastian wasn’t a talker. He was indeed talking a lot at the moment, with a lot more ease and vigor than Erik had reckoned he would, but the man was one for contemplation. He had contemplated a lot in the hours before they rang him up and asked to talk.
In any case, the limp was legally in his medical history. Erik had looked him up in the database. Forty-four this year, a retired stock broker with a wife who was working all the way in Japan now. The kid had been adopted from an orphanage. His limp was from a freak hockey game when the puck swung straight into his knee and his patella slipped off.
That wouldn’t do. One couldn’t simply bring a kid to a park and kill them with such a swift stroke in the heart, past the sternum and the ribs and lay him down exactly behind the bushes without catching any attention. Not with an 18th century scepter like that.
In the following silence, Sebastian’s eyes were slipping down to Erik’s scarf again.
“You like it? Was my wife’s. Can I ask you, Mr. Shaw, about your relationship with Mrs. Barnaby?”
“I told you earlier that you’ll speak to my lawyer.”
“With your son?”
“If you’ll excuse me, I have things to get on with.”
“Things, what things? Your son is dead, Mr. Shaw, he was killed with a knife that matches that used in the double murder of Magda Kowal and Wanda Lehnsherr when they were staked on the walls of St. Stanislaus, left overnight, and removed from the walls in the early dawn of Christmas Eve. Andy Shaw was not killed in this manner, but he was still killed, and now he is in a morgue you seem to have no intention in visiting, so tell me again that you wish to see your fucking lawyer.”
Spittle was flying and he was seeing red all over Sebastian’s white, white face. He didn’t realize he was standing now, a fistful of Sebastian’s shirt in his hand, Quested standing between them. His knuckles throbbed. He’d knocked something onto the ground and it was still rolling, rolling and rolling away from them.
Sebastian’s face sagged for an instant. He looked a lot more like a common house lizard, the kind of pest people killed with 3-in-1 sprays. But then it was back to its frigid silence. Sebastian wasn’t a talker.
Just then something vibrated. A screen on the living room wall showed another vehicle had arrived, a dorky blue Cooper that looked a lot warmer than anything else in a one hundred mile radius of the estate. Blood pulsed in Erik’s ears as Sebastian tried to shake himself off of his hand.
“Detective, this isn’t a legal way to perform an interview,” Quested said. When not a single muscle in Erik’s body moved, he turned to check the person who’d arrived so it might diffuse the situation.
And that was when Erik punched.
This was the stuff Erik was made of—the violence, the rush, the impossible anger that he’d grown up with his whole life. Walking into the rice mill in his early childhood to an infestation of rats feasting on his mother’s body. Why her? Why her when it could’ve been his doped up father, the useless trash who only knew how to smile with his mouth full of black teeth and suck on chicken bones when everyone else who deserved the meal were done with them.
It had taken him raw, this incident, and he’d spent days in the winter streets when there was no business to be done in the house except to bundle up and pray for heat, watching. Watching the blue-brows with their mittens and coats that weren’t just a patchwork of scrap fabric exit a restaurant, bells chiming, all warm as they laughed and stepped into a car and zoomed off. Happy. Someone had killed his mama and they were getting away with it because no one cares, son, you’re a poor bastard and that’s all you’ll ever be.
He was lost to it. Anger grabbed him by the throat, broiled his skin, and it wasn’t the pain so much as the incredible itch that drove him to madness. Punch after punch, he could scratch until he was just a pile of dead skin cells and it still wouldn’t be enough. He’d succeeded. He’d come to America, found a purpose and transformed into more than a poor bastard. Then Maple struck and now he was just that kid again, the one who hated everyone and everything.
Fingers dug into his skin. Someone was trying to hold him back, but it had taken a while to perceive the pain over his thick coat. Quested punched him. It was a special sort, like being hit by a WWE wrestler who you later realized was that nerd in homeroom. He might not be much of a detective over the span of his life, but the entertainment industry would welcome him.
The room was spinning, more from Erik being ripped apart from his anger than the throbbing pain in his cheek. Quested had meant for the punch to screw with his vision. He saw twos for a while, two Sebastian Shaws and two Questeds and—who was that? Some lanky woman was striding into the room, lips puckered, boobs flashing.
“That’s not appropriate for winter,” Erik said, if only to cope with the bleeding shame of losing to his compulsions like that. He was a wild animal and now they all knew. Being a wild animal in a cage was substantially more difficult than being one in the wild, where you could kill your prey and nature wouldn’t give you half a shit about it.
“Frost,” she said, and put a hand out to him. “The name’s Frost for a reason.”
It was more than exhibitionism. This woman could lure you in a bar and destroy you without getting the riding crop out. Her outfit served the same purpose as his pink scarf, and Erik wondered if he was really just that obviously a widower who was thirsting to get laid and forget all the anger.
Except he wasn’t, not really. There was only one person he wanted to lay—preferably six feet underground, with his spit on their face.
“And you are?”
Frost tilted her head back to Sebastian, who was adjusting the collar of his undershirt. “Attorney of Frost and Co. That’s my client.”
Erik gazed out of the ceiling-to-floor windows, at the Cooper that was parked by the entrance. “Very good timing.”
She smiled. “Naturally. This is going on the record, by the way.”
Erik glanced at the CCTV tucked away in one corner of the room.
“The only case this’ll help you with is his suspension.”
“I mean, good enough.”
Erik got up and brushed the dirt off his knees. Odds were against Sebastian however they wanted to frame the matter, even with the limp, once they got the search warrant. But these two were a deadly pair. Any evidence had probably been erased, even before Erik got here.
The pulsing in his blood had eased. Erik brushed the bruise on his cheek because pretending it wasn’t there was far more childish than giving it some acknowledgement.
“Well then, we’ll be leaving. I apologize for the…altercation.”
Frost laid a hand on his shoulder. “See you in court, love.”
Erik stepped aside. He scanned the room, eyes roving over a hunched Shaw and the cup of wine he’d knocked over. Frost captivated him more with his chapped lips, a patchwork of pink and peeling white that reminded him of the snake that bit when he was a kid. It happened on the fields back home, a tiny green thing that he’d smashed into smithereens with a solid brick. She’d tried to tame her serpentine lips with a smear of red, but coming over to Shaw’s was obviously an emergency.
He left the room and saw that Quested was hovering by the doorway. A torrent of snow rushed their way as they exited. And then Quested threw his head back in a fit of impossible laughter.
Erik turned off the radio as they got into Quested’s car. The Toyota’s radio had a tendency to turn on the second the engine started.
“Did you get anything?”
Quested dug in his pocket for what looked like a glove. But there was a folded picture inside that he pushed out without touching.
Erik turned away from the image. For a first-timer, Quested was showing a lot less horror than one would expect. So maybe his career wasn’t going to be a crack shot after all.
“Where’d you find it?” Erik asked. He leaned back on his seat and flexed his arms, unwinding from all the unused tension. If no one had stopped him, he could’ve gone on hitting that man until there was nothing left to trial.
“Restroom.”
Erik looked at him solidly for once. He hadn’t really acknowledged Quested even though it’d been weeks since he joined the department, nothing more than a few sidelong glances and the occasional cup (them both being married to work). The man was too pretty to be in this business, but he had one hell of a brain.
“Any evidence he’d been wanking off on it?”
“In my cellphone. But we’d have to come up with a good excuse for violating privacy. Also, you probably need a lawyer after that show.”
“All worth it,” Erik said, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t be out of this before he got the real Maple and snapped their head off.
Quested stowed the glove away in the front compartment of the car and drove off, sputtering across the snow-laden streets. It was only four in the afternoon but darkness was swallowing the horizon already, squeezing the last rays of sunlight out of the sky, and Erik had the fleeting thought that the first time he stepped off Polish Airlines, he’d thought this place was rather pretty.