George got a green marker and made two double lines under the initial timeline. The first he labeled “Pro,” the second “Amateur.” He tapped the back of the marker against the whiteboard. “I’m a bit out of touch with the going rates of professional killers. What would a three-person kill with such specific instructions cost?”
“I’m not sure. A simple kill these days is at around 50K I think, if you’re turning to a pro. If the targets aren’t protected somehow. Three people, 150K. A complicated kill like that? Probably a quarter million if not more.”
“Do I want to know why you’re familiar with the rates of professional killers?”
“I went by the break room a few weeks ago and Shireen was in a full-blown discussion with some beat officer about the costs of being a professional killer and how their rates are quite sensible when you included gear, living costs, retirement plan, insurance, health care, safe houses, and I don’t know what else. It sounded all very logical.” Andi shrugged.
“Except for the part where Shireen knows about the life necessities of professional killers.” George had a point, a good one, though Andi would never tell him why.
“She spends more time in the darknet than in real life. She’s bound to know things we’d rather not.”
George seemed to mull this over before he focused back on the whiteboard. “Anyway, a quarter million eliminates a whole bunch of suspects.” He pointed at the other whiteboard where they had two circles with “business rivals.” In the first one, there certainly were some names who had enough money to pay for a professional killer without it affecting their bottom line, but the reason for most of them to hate the three victims—and for being in the second circle—was because they had lost money to them. Lots of it. “I don’t think Tabitha Clemént and Josephine Garr would have the cash to pay a contract killer, let alone two. And they wouldn’t have been at the cabin themselves if they had paid somebody to kill them. It does keep Gideon Gartner and the wives in the pool, though.” George wrote their names between the first two lines. Then he pointed to the lines below. “Gartner is out here. Which still leaves Tamara Portius and Sophia McHill.”
“Could be. I’m writing Shireen a message to see if the wives had any contact beyond what they’ve claimed.”
George started twirling the marker in his fingers. “Somehow I just can’t picture any of the wives killing their husbands like that. I can totally see Theodora haggling with a contract killer about the price for Lawrence Miller’s death, but I can’t imagine why she would pay for the other two. Unless she was in cahoots with Tamara and Sophia, though I doubt it. Tamara, on the other hand, she strikes me as the type who would have done something drastic, like castrating Portius or something like that. She may try to keep her anger under a lid, but we’ve seen it boil over. No way would she have the patience to hire a professional who then drugs her husband and guides him out into the swamp if she could just bludgeon him to death herself where they were standing. And Sophia, she’s the type who would go for poison. She doesn’t want any unpleasantness.”
“Probably would ask her butler to do it for her.” Andi shared George’s assessment of the women. None of their personalities fit the way the murders were conducted. Then again, people lied all the time, and perhaps they were simply phenomenal actors.
“Tell Shireen to go digging about Portius’s finances as well. Perhaps this is something we can use.” George had put the marker down and was back in his chair, still staring at the whiteboard.
“Excellent idea.” Andi started typing. “How about we call it a day? I need to digest all this information.”
“You mean this indigestible chaos of leads and suspects not fitting what we know about the crime? Good luck!” George started gathering his things.
“Perhaps once it’s all settled down in our brains, we can find a pattern?” Andi wasn’t optimistic. There were just too many things not adding up. They needed some kind of break soon, otherwise he would have to try and find the two women from the lake, which was nearly impossible because he hadn’t seen any distinguishing features in them he could use as a guideline. If they really were contract killers, they had probably left the state already.
After George had gotten him home, Andi went outside to do his mediating in his gazebo. The air wasn’t as warm as just a few days before yet still pleasant enough. He did put on thick socks because his feet were always the first to get cold. Standing on the dark blue yoga mat, Andi went through the mixture of yoga, Pilates, and qui-gong movements that loosened his entire body, especially the area around his shoulders. Once he was sufficiently warmed up and his mind had started to settle down, focusing on the movements more than on his thoughts and the images coming from the insects, he sat down in a half lotus, closed his eyes, and started concentrating on the walls protecting his mind. Their thinning had halted, which meant he could now try to rebuild them. As mundane as it sounded, imagining them as actual walls like in an old medieval castle helped him with the task. The input from the arthropods was like the ocean churning against the stone, chipping at it, sometimes taking chunks out of it. He felt them, their minds—because for him they had minds, no matter what science tried to tell him—like little dots of light in the endless sea of impressions, each of them seeing and interpreting them differently, like a prism, only the other way round or, no, like a prism where you put in different lights and got out something else entirely, and he had to catalogue it, put it in the right regard, give it priority or ignore it, more often than not without really understanding, just guessing, he was doing so much guessing, and he had his own list of references, he could tell apart most drugs like cocaine and heroin, even the batches, and then he thought he had it figured out until he experienced something totally different and there just wasn’t anything he could relate it to, and it was so hard to forget these things, to dismiss them and concentrate on what he knew, because he was curious, oh yes, it was part of being a cop, a requirement, and too much curiosity killed the cat and one day he wouldn’t come back from one of his inquiries, and he always wondered how it would be, if they would find his catatonic body or if he would still be functioning somehow, going through the motions without anybody being in the driver’s seat, or if he would end up in a mental facility, pumped full of drugs that fulfilled the same purpose as alcohol only with different side effects, and would he realize the loss of control he feared so much or would he be grateful because he could finally let go, and what kind of life would that be, would he even be aware of being trapped in his mind or just lost in the consciousness of thousands of tiny minds, tiny lives, flaring up and winking out in a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, his own, perhaps, and where were the lines, what was reality and what was them, only they were real, too, even more so than many of the blobs, no, humans, he interacted with, and how would it feel to forget all about social necessities and just follow your instinct, and why was he here in the first place, he needed something to do, there was stone, hard, unyielding, yes, the walls, he had to reinforce them, because thegeschenkwas getting stronger, he was becoming more and more like them, just like hisOmahad, and she had once told him something, it was important, he thought, something aboutbeingthem, about embracing it all, stupid old woman with all her nastiness and her cold heart, seeing human beings as things, obstacles, blobs, liketheydid, having no compassion because she wasn’t one of them anymore, and looks could be deceiving, couldn’t they, making you believe one thing while another was true, like the stripes on the back of a mimic fly, pretending to be a wasp while really being harmless, only hisOmahad never been harmless, poisonous, in words and deeds, never helpful, telling him to accept what was ruining all his chances at being normal, and when you had no choices you made the best of what you were given, only it rarely worked, and those walls looked ready to crumble, no longer fit to keep anything in or out, so he better started putting new stones in, so much work, and the sea outside was crashing against them, but he could do it, had to do it, he didn’t want to give in yet, there were things he still wanted to do, life was still sweet enough to not be consumed by the bitterness of being more than one, of being born and dying and living all the time without a break, building his wall to keep that other reality at bay for a little longer….
14. Like Fathers, like Sons
GEORGE SERIOUSLYcontemplated putting Andi back in bed. If he even had been there the last night. It certainly didn’t look like it. His partner was wearing yoga pants that could have been black at some time. Now they were this washed-out gray, the cloth at the knees almost see-through and not in a sexy way, the hems at the legs fraying. The thick woolen socks seemed to be hand-knitted and had turned to felt in some places. A sweater of dubious color and form rounded out an outfit that perfectly matched the tired expression in Andi’s eyes. He stepped aside to let George into the house.
“I’m sorry. Didn’t hear the alarm. Can you give me five minutes to shower?”
“Take fifteen, and don’t break your neck on the tiles. Should I make tea?” George tried to sound nonchalant and was doing a terrible job. Andi rolled his eyes.
“I got kind of lost yesterday, okay? The good news is, I was able to strengthen my mental shields, but it took longer than I thought.”
“Okay.” It was far from being okay, not the way Andi looked as if he’d been on a three-day binge with more alcohol than one person should be able to consume. Knowing Andi hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff made it even worse. George hated to ask the question, but he had to. “Are you even able to go to work today?”
Instead of getting angry, which would have been George’s cue that Andi could go to work, his partner seemed to think about it. “I’m tired.” Andi yawned as if he wanted to stress his words. “I can go, though. Let’s just hope Shireen has found something good for us to wake me up properly.” With that, Andi went toward the stairs.
George stayed in the kitchen with nothing else to do but set the water to boil and rummage in the cupboard over the sink for some tea. He found a blend of peppermint, sage, and lemon balm which he knew Andi liked. He did have the obligatory cup of herbal tea from Starbucks in his car, which Andi could drink later. This moment called for loose leaves, and besides, George needed to occupy himself. Otherwise he would have stormed upstairs to check on Andi, which he was sure would not be appreciated. While the tea was steeping, George wondered how he could help Andi. The gaps in their conversations when Andi’s mind wandered elsewhere were getting more frequent and long enough to draw attention from outsiders. George was still able to gloss it all over, but they had to find some kind of solution soon. Even those who were used to Andi’s weird ways, namely Shireen, Evangeline, and Adam Forard, the leader of one of the SWAT teams, had started to regard Andi with worry, which told George that his partner had never before been this bad. How he should breach the subject without getting his head bitten off, George still wasn’t sure. He definitely had to wait until Andi was in a better mood than now.
“Oh, smells great.” Andi was coming down the stairs, his dirty-blond hair tousled. He had changed into one of his threadbare old jeans, which only stayed on his hips because of the worn leather belt that also held Andi’s badge. His attempt at looking like a respectable detective by wearing a shirt and jacket was hampered because the shirt looked like something George’s grandfather might have worn, and the jacket seemed to have been there when the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart. When they had first met, George had been appalled by Andi’s lack of care for his looks. Now he would have found it endearing if he hadn’t known that it was simply another side effect of thegeschenk. Andi only had a limited amount of strength at his disposal, most of which he used to keep his mental shields up. The rest was for solving cases. There simply wasn’t room for something as mundane as going clothes shopping. George wondered if their relationship had by now progressed far enough for him to follow his suggestion from a few days before and buy Andi a wardrobe. He understood how it could seem like he was patronizing his partner when in truth all he wanted was to make Andi’s life easier. And his partner had reacted positively to the two sweaters. Watching while Andi put an obscene amount of honey into his travel mug with the tea, George decided to just go for it. If Andi decided he didn’t like it after all, he could always return the stuff. Yes, that was a good idea.
After Andi was done stirring the tea, they went to George’s car. At the precinct, they found several messages from Shireen in their email inboxes. One was actually from Timmy Delain, the newbie Shireen had tasked with composing the reports on the mistresses of Harry Alexander McHill, as well as the sex workers David Hector Portius II had met. The list of the mistresses was complete, and much to George’s dismay, none of them stood out. It appeared they all had been given quite the money to keep their silence, not to mention the airtight NDA they all had signed when entering their respective relationships with McHill. Three of them hadn’t been in the country during the time of the crime, and the other four had ironclad alibis. None of them had the financial means to hire a contract killer without it being noticed, and unless Timmy or Shireen found out they had somehow been in contact with each other, they were out of the investigation. The sex workers Portius had frequented were a more difficult matter; there were too many to expect Timmy to have dossiers on all of them. Their sheer mass was also what dismissed them as prime suspects—Portius’s contact with them seemed to have been on a purely business level, and the crime screamed personal.
The first message from Shireen was sobering. It said she couldn’t find any closer contact between the three wives than the necessary calls and short texts needed when on the same committee to organize a charity. Unless they had used burner phones or smoke signals, they had told the truth about not being close. The second message told them to come into Shireen’s lair because she had found something.
With all the honey from the tea coursing through his system, Andi appeared to be a little more awake, which was more than George had dared to hope on their way over. Shireen greeted them with a cheerful smile. “Rejoice, dear Detectives, I have good news.”
“You found a contract on the darknet?” Andi sounded almost alert now.
“No. If there was a contract out for the victims, it’s either already deleted or very well hidden. Rather the former than the latter.”
“Then why are you so disgustingly happy?”
