Charged - Book One Read online

  I pushed my hand into the wall and some of the mud was still soft. It had been patched in the last couple of days. I didn’t question my actions until my hand was already in the wall. Then I paused, thinking this was a bad idea and I recalled everything I knew about Richie.

  He wasn’t that bad. He just made bad choices. And he wasn’t a killer. He was just incapable of coping. I couldn’t blame him for that. With that thought, I continued to push my hand into the wall and I pulled out a small, crumpled blue sheet a little larger than a pillowcase, like a toddler’s bed sheet. I started to unravel it. I figured it was a wad of cash or stolen wallets or drugs. Then something rolled out of the sheet, making a light thud on the stiff carpet. It was a little metal box. Nothing I recognized.

  Great. I just loved it when things wrapped in sheets rolled out of them, rubbing off any viable prints. I let out a sigh as I examined it. It was about three inches long, two inches wide and maybe a half-inch thick. I picked it up and it was lighter than I expected, not solid. I looked for a screen or a way to open it, but there was nothing.

  I sat on the couch with the little silver box in my hand and a hideous image of Richie’s skull flashed in my mind. I shook my head slightly, trying to focus on the box.

  What did you get yourself into?

  The difference between shooters and slashers was about ten levels of crazy. Slashers were desperate, isolated, removed from reality, delusional. Or worse, real sickos, the ones that enjoyed it, smiled at it and were aroused by it, even when the victim was small, young and helpless. The kind that tortured their victims and all you could do was try to find that link, that one lead so they couldn’t do it again. I didn’t miss that, not at all and yet here I was.

  It was disappointing that I didn’t see how his body was laying in the alley. I had no way of knowing if it was strategically placed or just discarded which would’ve given me a hint of what I was dealing with.

  I thought of Richie again. What I didn’t understand was if Richie’s death was over this little box; why not just beat Richie senseless for the location of it? Why kill him before you got it back? I knew Richie, or at least I did back in the day and even though he had more guts than anyone I knew, he would rat on someone in a heartbeat if his life depended on it. He would’ve given up the box. So why didn’t he get that opportunity?

  The box didn’t look important to me, but you didn’t conceal it in a wall if it wasn’t important. And someone wanted it bad enough to tear the paneling off the walls and slice Richie’s head open as if it were going to be inside of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHEN I GOT OFF THE LIGHT RAIL, it was brisk and nearing dusk, but thankfully not raining, which always made my injury worse. I slid into the cold leather seat of my truck and headed home. I was only a couple of streets from my place when I stopped off to grab some beers and I noticed the pain in my knee had escalated and I was limping more than I was this morning.

  Home was one of three apartments above Valentino’s restaurant. Apartments on top of businesses were pretty common in Seattle, since all the land was built up. It seemed to me that if someone wanted to build something new, then something else would have to be torn down first. At least I didn’t have to worry about my place, Valentino’s was very popular.

  The living space was simple — four rooms, with a large living room partly filled with old books. I divided half of the living room into a simple office with an antique desk and chair. On the opposite side were an oversized leather sectional and a large flat-screen.

  Plus, now that I had Zero, it might be difficult trying to find a new place. Zero was my trembling, pathetic, severely over-caffeinated, seven-pound Chihuahua. He was definitely not my first choice in K-9 protection. Some hundred and twenty-year-old woman on the third floor died, leaving Zero creeping around my place. The neighbor left out an occasional bowl of food for him, as did I. Then, about a month ago, the neighbor moved out, leaving Zero abandoned.

  So, that night, Zero was at the glass door on the lower level greeting me when I got home. His ears were folded back against his head, his eyes bulging, staring into my soul as I opened the door. The fur under his eyes was stained with tears and he couldn’t have looked any more pathetic unless he started limping. Then he followed me to my door, waiting for me to invite him in, looking half-starved. An expression that, I later noticed, never changed. So I did.

  As I entered my domain, Zero greeted me. He responded by trembling, as he always did and I triple-bolted the door. Sluggishly, I moved over to the freezer and grabbed a bag of peas to ice my knee with. I sat on the couch with a beer, the peas and the little box I found in Richie’s apartment. There were no designs on it. It didn’t seem to weigh more than a few ounces. I shook it lightly and nothing rattled.

  I thought about Richie again, considering his lifestyle. I was relieved at never having to lock him up during my career and at the same time disappointed that our reunion was what it was. I wondered who he stole the box from. I felt so limited with the box in my hand. There were no forensic scientists at my disposal like when I was a detective. Most of my private detective work now consisted of, “I think my wife is cheating on me,” “I think my husband is cheating on me,” “I think my son is doing drugs.”

  After I surfed through forty-something channels, I came across the news.

  “A forty-two-year-old man was found brutally murdered in the streets of downtown Seattle. There are currently no suspects and the Seattle police are asking that if anyone has witnessed anything to please come forward.”

  The Asian reporter stood in front of the taped-off crime scene. It was an alley next to a Chinese restaurant that I knew. That was it; approximately five seconds of coverage. I guess he didn’t compare to the six people gunned down two days ago at the café four streets away.

  I thought of Richie. He was a good kid back then, like an older brother. We spent a lot of time together just hanging out. We walked to school together and he’d help me with my homework when mom was working late. I let my mind drift into the past thinking of all the good old days. Then I remember that one day, that awful day. It was so crisp in my mind I could actually still hear it in my head.

  Richie was by my side when we found her body. She was lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. And someone was screaming. I tried to shake the image out of my head. I didn’t want to remember. It wouldn’t change anything for Richie if I thought about it. All I could do for him was find who murdered him. Quickly, I shoved the memory back down. No, not today. I’m not thinking about it today. That was thirty years ago.

  I continued to search three hundred more channels of absolutely nothing interesting when someone knocked on the front door. Slowly, I limped to the door. A woman’s voice called from beyond it.

  “Kegger, you home?”

  I’d recognize that sultry voice anywhere. It was Lolita, the hooker who worked the corner two streets down. I ran my fingers through my messy brown hair, trying to tame it, grateful it was still there at forty.

  “Oh, Kegger, I’ve had the worst night,” she said, as I opened the door. She let herself in and grabbed my beer, finishing it.

  Lolita wore a black plastic skirt that was about five inches long and tightly hugged her toned thighs. She looked trashy: bright red lipstick, fishnet stockings and fake eyelashes an inch too long stretching out from a set of dark brown eyes that you could just dive into.

  Yet Lolita was different. She could separate her work from her life, something I’d attempted to do for almost two decades unsuccessfully. She referred to it as a “dirty job,” but she wasn’t bitter and hardened by it, which I thought was strange.

  Over a glass of wine, she once told me how some of the older guys just wanted to talk or be next to her. I understood that need for companionship, having spent what seemed like the better years of my life completely immersed in my work, thinking I could somehow change the world.

  “There’s something attractive about a man that always carries his gun
on him,” she said with a seductive glance, sliding her hands over my chest. She was always invading my space. It was a little game she liked to play with me. I think it was called, “how many places could she caress me before I let her seduce me.” So far, I was winning this game.

  Oh, I wanted Lolita, I wanted her bad, but she belonged to everyone and no one. I enjoyed her company, our conversations, the frozen peas she’d put in my freezer believing I would cook them someday. And I admit I liked the tiny skirts, but she would never let her job go and I knew that. So I never touched her. I was her safe zone; I was her friend. And since my knee got blown out, I realized she was my friend, too.

  She and Aaron would check on me daily until I could get around with the cane. It got annoying after a while, but that first month was hell and not a single guy on the force even called. I figured out some time afterward it was just as painful for my old co-workers as it was for me.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT MORNING, when I rolled out of bed around nine, Lolita was gone from the couch and the box was still under my mattress. After three cups of coffee and a shower, I decided to go to Aaron’s shop.

  Aaron owned an electronics repair shop around the corner, filled with everything imaginable for an electrician’s hard-on. He was my small crew of chemists and scientists. I admit he’s brilliant, but he’s strange. The little room in the back of his shop was filled with books like “Unsolvable Mathematical Equations” and “Fun with Algorithms,” or something like that. He graduated from high school two years early and had a PhD from Harvard. Yet he says his two favorite things in the whole world are a really cold beer in the morning and a really hot shower. Or was it a really hot shower in the morning and a really cold beer? I couldn’t remember. But I did know that he loved puzzles.

  This wasn’t what made him strange. What made him strange was that last week his hair was blue and this week it was bright orange. His tongue is pierced, along with his eyebrow and a few other body parts that I don’t wish to discuss. He also has enough tattoos that if my mother were alive, she’d be praying for him. Plus, I have an easy twelve years on him and to this day I still don’t know why we get along. Younger brother I always wanted? Not exactly.

  When I got to Aaron’s place, he closed the shop and we went and got a booth at Barney’s Pub.

  I placed the box in front of him, “What do you make of this?

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t know,” I replied.

  He flipped the box over, examining every side silently. He was intrigued. I could see the gears in his head turning, or maybe all the hair dye was affecting his facial expressions.

  “Working again?”

  “Side job,” I said. Meaning I wasn’t being paid for my services.

  “Thought you were retired?”

  “Not retired, disabled,” I said, dryly. I couldn’t blame him for asking. I hadn’t done a lot of P.I. work in the last four months.

  “How’s the knee?” he said, probably noticing I’d been using my cane almost every day now. I myself wondered if all the surgeries were even helping. I saw progress at first, then after a few months, it seemed to decline. I’d pretty much lost hope that I would ever be back to work.

  “Three more surgeries,” I lied, unconvincingly. The lack of circulation in the leg was evident, at least to me.

  “If they won’t pay for it—”

  I cut him off. “In the line of duty, it’s all covered,” wondering who was watching out for whom.

  I’d known Aaron for six years. I dropped off my laptop at his shop, thinking he was just the clerk at the time. I made it real clear the notes that I couldn’t access were sensitive. I showed him my badge and he nodded his head and had it fixed in twenty minutes. I should have used our own IT department, but they were backlogged by weeks.

  When he fixed it, he also read all my notes, interjecting all his analytical ideas as to who murdered the woman right onto my own hard drive without my permission. He even created his own folder on my desktop, labeled “Whodunnit.” His theories were, however, subsequently correct and I’ve basically been picking his brain ever since.

  After I consumed a Reuben sandwich and a couple more cups of coffee, I left the box with him.

  CHAPTER 5

  LATER THAT EVENING, I decided to investigate the alley off of Third Street. I took the light rail to downtown and quickly found the alley where Richie was killed. It was everything I wasn’t hoping for. The crime scene was still taped off, but the rain pretty much washed everything away.

  The alley was deep, forty feet back, completely vacant of any light. It was a dead end, with two-story walls on all three sides encasing it. I saw a dumpster and one door to the Chinese restaurant on the left, which I’m sure was bolted from the inside. It was horrific. I could envision Richie running down this alley and being trapped. It was narrow and he wasn’t going to get out of it unless he grew wings. I wondered if he gave up and just stood there.

  And why did he even go down this alley? He lived in downtown for the last twenty years and I knew Richie; he would’ve known every nook and cranny of it. He must have been running for his life, disoriented maybe, or high. The thought made me cringe.

  I rubbed my forehead and looked at all the angles of the other buildings. There were no bank cameras and the back of the alley was barely visible from where I was standing. Plus, everything in downtown shut down early in this area. I managed to speak to the restaurant owner for a few seconds while he was closing up. His son discovered Richie’s body, but he wasn’t there and the owner currently didn’t know where he was. I would have to come back to talk to him. So I headed back to my apartment.

  A couple of hours had passed when my cell rang. It was Aaron.

  “Hey,” I answered.

  “Man, you gotta see this!”

  I was back at his shop in fifteen minutes and I brought Zero for the walk. I’m a tall man, but with the dog next to me, my ego felt about five inches tall. I was acutely aware of his miniature size when we walked.

  “Is that the new guard dog?” he said, opening the door.

  I’d done it again, somehow found another animal to save.

  “Yes, and if you make him angry he turns into a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler.”

  He let a laugh escape him, shaking his head and locked the door behind us as we headed toward the back of the shop.

  “First of all, where’d you get this?” he said.

  “Off a dead guy.”

  He looked up at me for a moment, ripping his attention away from the box. It was just another piece of the puzzle for him. There was no way I was going to tell him it was evidence to a current homicide case that I shouldn’t have in my possession.

  The box was opened into two parts on the table, as if it had a seam that I hadn’t noticed before and it was filled with wires. We sat down in front of it at an antique table covered with books and a chessboard with brass pieces. He turned on a desk lamp and pointed into the right half.

  “Now that it’s open… I can tell you what it’s not,” he said.

  I waited, noticing the excitement in his face.

  “It’s not: a phone, mp3 player, GPS, portable scanner, or a weapon.”

  That didn’t leave much.

  “You want to hear something strange?”

  “What?”

  “There’s no battery in it. No charging port.”

  “So?”

  “It’s glowing.” He hit the lights next to the back door and it was glowing, although it was dim, or at least the wires were.

  Aaron was smiling now, like we had something amazing in our possession, a foreign technology of some kind. It didn’t make any sense. He turned the lights back on after a few seconds.

  “You see this space?” he said, pointing to a hollow socket in the box. “It seems to be missing something. My guess would be a transmitter, some kind of locating device. Possibly a GPS chip.” He then flipped it over and pointed to several quarter-inch slots that I
also couldn’t see in Richie’s dim apartment.

  “See these? There are thirteen slots designed to accept plugs of some sort. I think it’s a key.”

  “To what?”

  He then pointed to the inside of the box to the tiny print set in the center, which read “Station 13.” Under “Station 13” was a series of numbers, which didn’t seem to make much sense. Well, it wasn’t foreign.

  “So what’s Station 13?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “It could be anything. A missile base, a database, the Pentagon’s basement for all I know. Who was the dead guy?”

  “He was nobody important,” I said, not wanting to reveal the gash in Richie’s head or my past relationship with him. “That’s it?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say, ‘that’s it.’” He smiled at me, seeming pleased with his own genius, which was a common expression for him. “There is no voltage running through this thing. There’s no electrical current at all.”

  I shook my head, letting him know I wasn’t following him.

  “It’s glowing. Glowing. Let me put it to you this way. There is a warning label on every cell phone sold; my DMM can read the electrical current in a human body, but this? Nothing. I can’t even get a static charge off of it. I’ve seen a lot of things, but nothing like this. It’s not metal. Looks like metal, feels like metal, but it’s not. I put a torch to this thing for five minutes and it didn’t even get warm. And you’re gonna’ have to explain to me how this box is glowing without some kind of power, ‘cuz I can’t explain it.”

  Now this intrigued me. This seemed to be a recurring theme; first the morgue and now this box. Nothing like this.

  “Well, I doubt it opens the Pentagon’s basement,” I said, laughing a little at his imagination.