One Kill Away Read online

  “If, in the coming days,” Dr. Judy Galloway had told him, “you begin to experience vivid flashbacks or nightmares…be sure to call me at once.”

  During their interview last week—two weeks after the shooting of Herb Matteau—Allan had kept it all to himself. Everything was fine, he’d told her. No bad dreams. No trouble sleeping. No jumping at loud noises. No reliving the tragedy on that farm in Acresville.

  Of course it all had been fiction. To admit any weakness, he feared, would result in a fitness-for-duty evaluation, then he’d be branded as unfit for duty. He knew of other officers involved in FFDEs who had faked being okay for the same reasons. Still, there were others who had exaggerated symptoms to become eligible for disability benefits.

  Allan rolled his neck and shoulders, trying to work the kink out. Then he folded his hands across his stomach. Over the noise of jet engines, came a mélange of sounds around the cabin: crisp book pages turning, a door closing and the click of a latch, the lady in the seat behind him talking proudly about her daughter’s upcoming convocation ceremony at York University, the child in the back row asking when they were landing.

  Next to him, a middle-aged woman with short hair watched a movie on the seatback TV in front of her. Denzel Washington was on the screen, engaged in a fierce gunfight in the middle of a post-apocalyptic town. From the woman’s earbuds, Allan could hear the tinny sounds of gunfire, of bullets cutting the air, of a man screaming.

  He turned to the window beside him. Out below the wing, the shadow of the plane moved across billows of sunlit cloud tops, a beautiful rainbow ring encircling it. The flawless sky was as bright and pale blue as he’d ever seen it before. It seemed to go on forever.

  After a few moments, the plane began descending through the clouds and soon Allan could barely make out the wing. He heard the pleasant-faced man in the seat ahead of him chomping his gum, probably trying to help his ears from popping.

  A bell chimed twice and the seatbelt sign lit up. A stewardess made an announcement to everyone, “Ladies and gentlemen, as we start our descent, please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. Thank you.”

  Another voice repeated the message in French.

  Everyone started getting ready, straightening their seats, pushing up their tray tables, passing cups and glasses to the stewardesses.

  Allan buckled himself in and checked his watch: 10:12. In Toronto it would be 9:12. He set the watch back an hour to reflect the time change.

  When the plane came out of the clouds, he looked down at the sprawling metropolis of Toronto, an ever-growing monster of glass, steel, and concrete. The CN Tower soared above a plethora of buildings, random in their shapes and sizes. Sailboats and yachts dotted the blue water of the inner harbor.

  The plane continued its flight over the buildings and the bustling freeways and interchanges of the city. The no-smoking sign flashed and the voice of the Captain came over the speaker, “Flight attendants, please prepare for landing. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just been cleared to land at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Please take a moment to make sure your seatbelts are securely fastened.”

  The wheels touched down, bounced once, and settled onto the runway.

  “Perfect,” someone said. “What a perfect touchdown.”

  A few passengers clapped and cheered.

  Allan smiled. A flood of excitement rushed through his body. He couldn’t wait to see Brian again.

  Nine months had been too long to be away from his son.

  3

  Halifax, June 8

  11:10 a.m.

  “Smell that?” asked Sergeant Malone.

  Lieutenant Audra Price sniffed the air as she crossed the rear parking lot with a notebook and Tyvek booties in her hands. She could smell it, even at a good distance from the apartment’s open doorway. Sickly sweet with a hint of rusty copper, the odor rode a current of air, crawled over her face, and up through her nostrils. Blood. Lots of it and not fresh either. Definitely several hours old.

  She wondered what carnage awaited her. What circumstances had provoked someone to act as judge, jury and executioner? And Audra knew the motives would be absurd. They always were. People murdered others for the stupidest of reasons.

  A first-floor apartment window captured her reflection like a photograph, a slender woman of forty-one with level, blue eyes, olive skin and curly blonde hair with balayage highlights. She wore a conservative blouse and slacks, and carried herself with swift, athletic movements, the result of twenty years of exercise—running or cycling in the early morning, gyms at night. Her gold badge was clipped beside her belt buckle. A digital camera dangled from a strap around her neck.

  Malone handed her the sign-in form attached to a clipboard. Audra tucked the notebook and booties under her arm and timed into the scene. Gave the clipboard back to him when she finished.

  “How bad is it in there?” she asked.

  Malone breathed in deeply, once, and exhaled. “God-awful bad.”

  Audra looked up at him, and Malone nodded.

  “Yep,” he said. “Incredibly violent.”

  At 62, Malone had the hard-boiled demeanor of someone who’d seen more of society’s underbelly than he wanted to. He was tall with a hawkish face that seldom changed expression even on the happiest of days. His scalp glistened through his crew cut.

  Audra opened her notebook to a blank page, clicked the top of her pen, and wrote: 1276 Queen St. Apt. 4. TOA – 11:10 am. Cloudy. Temp. 15°C

  “Who’s the victim?” she asked.

  “Todd Dory.”

  “Dory?” Audra paused at the name. “Sounds familiar.”

  “He’s been in the news recently. Has a rap sheet a mile long.”

  “Caucasian?”

  “Yes. Twenty-six years old.”

  Audra wrote down the details. “Does he live here?”

  “He did.”

  “Alone?”

  “According to the brief statement we got from the girlfriend, yes.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Wendy Drummond.”

  “Did she find the body?”

  Malone hitched up the holster side of his gun belt. “She did.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  “They took her to the QE2 for shock.”

  “Did they get a statement?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  Pausing, Audra looked up from the page. “Oh.” She closed the notebook and hooked her pen on the cover. “I guess I’ll talk to her later.”

  She stepped away and gave the scene a full sweep with her eyes. The murder had occurred in a two-story row house on Queen Street. Half the building was painted green with red trim; the other half purple with yellow trim. Barrier tape encircled the property to keep everyone out. Two uniformed officers ID’ed anyone wanting through.

  Audra could hear the sounds of the city around her—engines revving and slowing, car doors shutting, fading chatter of people walking on the sidewalks.

  She noted two compost bins and a dumpster pushed against the chain-link fence at the far corner of the parking lot. On the right side, a picket fence divided the property from Atlantic News, a magazine store on the corner of Morris Street.

  In the surrounding buildings, a smattering of figures stood at windows with their cell phones held up to the glass. Very soon images and videos of the murder scene would be uploaded to the Internet. Another person’s brutal death laid out on display for the voyeuristic world to see.

  Audra looked off to the parking lot of the Mary Queen of Scots Inn next door where a crowd of onlookers had gathered. She took in each face, many young and multicultural. Close-by, a clump of news people set up cameras.

  She walked back over to Malone and pointed her chin to the onlookers. “Let’s get a plainclothes officer to mingle with the crowd,” she said. “See if anyone’s talking.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”
<
br />   Malone keyed his shoulder mike, speaking into it in hushed tones. A voice answered back over his radio, “Copy that. Someone will be there in ten.”

  Audra gave Malone a thumbs-up. “Has Coulter been notified?”

  “He’s on the way.”

  “Good.”

  Audra clicked on her camera and made a 360-degree turn with it, taking pictures of the neighboring buildings, the row house, the driveway beside it, the parking lot, the license plates of three cars parked by the back fence, the faces on the civilian side of the barrier tape.

  A slight breeze lifted her curls as Audra approached the row house. Five feet outside the apartment she noticed a puddle of vomit on the asphalt. She stopped and aimed her camera at it.

  “That would be the girlfriend’s,” Malone called out to her.

  Audra turned and threw him a smile. “Okay. I gotcha.”

  She snapped off a couple of shots, then continued toward the scene. When she reached the stoop outside the first-floor apartment, the smell of blood grew stronger. Audra saw the Ident crew busy at work—Harvey Doucette applying a light coat of aluminum dust over the outside doorknob, and Jim Lucas shooting away with his camera. Both men wore full Tyvek coveralls with attached hood and boots. HEPA respirators covered their mouths and noses.

  Audra slipped the booties on over her shoes. Tugging a pair of latex gloves from a front pocket, she pulled them on her hands.

  “Is it safe to come in?” she asked the men.

  Harvey looked over his shoulder at her, a brush poised in one hand, an oval palette containing a small amount of powder in the other. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. Audra knew all too well how hot those coveralls could get.

  “Just keep to the outer perimeter of the kitchen,” Harvey said, his voice muffled by the respirator. “Left side.”

  “Want a mask, Lieutenant?” Jim asked.

  “If you have a spare.”

  “I have a few.” The hulking man dropped to a squat at his equipment case and took out a HEPA respirator. He tossed it over to Audra.

  “Thank you, Jim.”

  She positioned the respirator on her face and stretched the elastic straps over the back of her head, watching Harvey take a puffer bulb to blow off excess powder from the doorknob.

  “Got a couple partials,” he said. “Good ridge detail.”

  Jim leaned in and shot photos of the revealed prints.

  “Hopefully they belong to the suspect,” Audra said.

  Jim turned his head slightly toward her. “We can always hope.”

  Audra examined the doorframe and the edge of the door for pry marks in the wood. Didn’t find any. She then scooched past the men and stepped into the kitchen, surveying it with a slow roll of her head left to right. As her gaze settled on that part of the room where the murder had occurred, a sharp exhalation rushed out of her mouth. Malone wasn’t kidding when he’d called it God-awful. It had the look of an explosion of rage, and the contrast of blood against the white of the kitchen made the scene jaw-dropping.

  Linear patterns of blood spatter ran up the south wall over the ceiling toward the north wall by the back door and then back again. Someone had swung a bloody weapon repeatedly. Possibly a tire iron, a bat, or even a pipe.

  Audra could only see the victim’s right foot and part of a leg on the floor by the kitchen table. The table itself blocked the rest of him. Off to the left a pale lump of flesh lay on the floor by the refrigerator. Audra swallowed when she realized it looked like a human ear.

  Blood had flowed from the body and formed a large pool in the middle of the floor. The outer edges looked to be separated from the serum and the blood was dark and crystallizing in the shallower areas of the pool.

  Audra snapped off several photos with her camera. She inspected the rest of the floor for any footwear impressions from the suspect. Clean. Someone had been careful.

  Instead of moving in directly to view the body, Audra first looked around, noting details. The place was small and dirty, but not unbearably so. The ceiling light shone above one of those square discount shades that had become a graveyard for several flies. Print dust coated the light switch by the back door where Jim and Harvey worked away. Beside that, a drawn roller shade closed off the view of the rear parking.

  Audra’s gaze moved over the eight, empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, the two glasses in a sink full of dirty plates and utensils, the three chairs pushed in against the kitchen table. Nothing seemed to be rummaged through. The drawers were intact. The cupboard doors were closed. No food looked like it was being prepared prior to the murder.

  A doorway on each end of the south wall opened into other rooms. Audra glanced into the dark room on the left and saw shadows and shapes of what she believed to be a sofa, a television atop a stand. In the one on the right, the shape of a bed, a dresser. Daylight highlighted the edges of another drawn blind.

  Audra moved deeper into the kitchen, keeping close to the left wall, and as she laid eyes on the body her stomach knotted in anxious tension. Throughout her five years in homicide, she’d been forced to take what she saw in stride, to distance herself from the murder and mayhem man imposed on his fellow man. She’d marveled at the countless ways people chose to murder one another, heard all the inexplicable reasons no one of sound mind or judgment could even fathom.

  Then came those rare occasions such as this, one that would set the bar even higher and sear the memory like a branding iron.

  Audra found herself staring not at the mangled body of Todd Dory face-up on the floor, but at the axe stuck in his head. An unusual weapon of choice to say the least. On closer inspection, Audra realized it wasn’t your common chopping or splitting axe found in every hardware store, it was one of those pick-head axes used by Fire & Rescue and demolition crews. Definitely a specialty item, and with any luck the manufacturer had a short list of buyers in the area.

  The axe had a wooden handle and someone had written a word in black marker on the side of it. At first Audra couldn’t make it out, then she realized the word was upside down. She tilted her head to see it.

  “Corpse,” she whispered to herself.

  Strange. Why that? Because Dory now was one? Or did it have a deeper meaning?

  She lifted her camera, zoomed in on the word, and captured some close-up photos. Backed the zoom off and took additional photos from different angles. Then she tried to visualize what had happened here.

  It looked as if Dory had been bound to a chair and his mouth taped shut prior to being hacked repeatedly. He then fell back in a bloody heap on the floor once the pick end of the axe head drove into the top of his head. His legs were splayed on each side of the chair seat with his arms twisted underneath him. A flap of skin hung off the left side of his face with a blood-soaked shaving of bone in it. There were several incised wounds in the neck and shoulders.

  Just from the sheer brutality of the attack, Audra sensed the murder displayed a fiery relationship between Dory and the suspect. At the very least, the crime required close contact, which meant the chance of trace evidence.

  “What would a shrink make of this?” asked Jim, walking over.

  Audra shrugged. “Not sure. I see a lot of rage.”

  “Makes you wonder whose wife he was screwing.”

  “Hmmm.” Audra kept her eyes on the body. “That’s possible. Apparently he has an extensive criminal background, so I’m sure he’s made a few enemies.”

  “Malone said he ran with Lee Higgins’ group of thugs,” Jim called over to Harvey, who gently lifted the fingerprint from the doorknob with cellophane tape, “What’s that gang called, Harvey?”

  “Black Scorpions. They only had four or five members. Two of them were sent to Renous last November for shooting Ruben Gamble.” Harvey placed the tape on a latent print card and smoothed it out. “Didn’t you and Stanton work that case, Lieutenant?”

  Audra nodded. “Yeah, we did. Gamble was just an innocent bystander. They just grazed their intended victim.”


  “The Black Scorpions were involved in the usual gang shit: drug trafficking, assault, robbery, auto theft. As far as I know the remaining members have been quiet for a while. Two weeks ago, Todd Dory here just got off an armed robbery charge from last year.”

  Audra narrowed her eyes on Harvey. “I remember now. That convenience store over on Herring Cove. Jury acquitted Dory because they felt the clerk was an unreliable witness.”

  “Recanted her story,” Harvey said. “Swore on the stand that it wasn’t Dory and that she had smoked some weed outside the store just before the robbery happened.” He began filling out the print card with a pen. “Scared, I bet. Funny, officers didn’t report her being under the influence at the time.”

  Audra nodded again. “Someone got to her.”

  Harvey held up the print card for Jim to photograph. Audra chewed the inside of her mouth, staring at the axe again. Something bothered her about it. She had no doubts a guy with an axe was a scary thing—she would surely run—and the axe itself was capable of inflicting great damage, but it seemed such an awkward and cumbersome weapon to wield. It required a swing to be effective. It was top-heavy and ran the risk of getting stuck in something.

  Audra wondered if it would scare Todd Dory enough to comply with whatever the suspect wanted him to do. Here was a guy, what six-foot, two hundred pounds. A gangbanger. Probably a tough guy. Probably had an illegal gun or two hidden somewhere in the apartment. Wouldn’t he wrestle the suspect over the axe? Yet there were no signs of a struggle.

  This drummed up two possible scenarios right away—more than one suspect, or another weapon was used to get Dory to comply first. Maybe a combination of both.

  Audra glanced at the kitchen door again. No peephole. No intercom on the wall. Wouldn’t Dory have vetted the person knocking before opening up? Was he expecting someone? Had he known the suspect?

  Audra made her way into the living room, carefully stepping around furniture, until she reached the front window. She snapped up the shade and squinted at the sudden rush of daylight into the room. The window looked onto Queen Street and she saw a bored looking officer kicking at stones on the sidewalk in front of the building. Barricades, positioned at the corners of Morris And South, stopped traffic from entering the area.