Page 23
First Week of the New Year…
K ate walked back into the office.
Rodney looked up at her and smiled. “You look better. Nothing like taking a week away to help reset your system.”
“Yeah, it was a pretty rough for a bit.”
“Ken really shot up your apartment, huh ?”
She nodded. “Yeah, he didn’t care. He waited until I got close to opening the door and started blasting. Simon tackled me from behind. As I was headed for the door, he had some vision about my body being riddled with bullets, and, the next thing I know, I’m flat on the ground, and my apartment is being razed with gunfire.”
“Jesus,” Rodney muttered, his eyes wide in shock. “I guess your stepfather figured that, as long as he was going down, he might as well have something to go down over.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, staring at him. “It still makes no sense to me. Anyway I very much want things to get back to normal, whatever normal is.”
“Around here, normal can be all kinds of things, but it’s never what we expect it to be,” he said, with a smile. “I’m more than happy to have you and Lilliana back.”
“Did she take off for the holidays too?”
“She was dragging by the time we got Peter’s case dealt with, so she took some days to regroup.”
Kate nodded. “Hopefully it’ll be calm for a bit.”
Rodney smiled. “I could go for calm. Calm for more than a bit would be nice.”
“I agree, although evidence to blow my brother’s case wide open would be nice.”
“Sorry. Everything on Timmy’s case was a false trail, which we figured, coming from Ken,” Rodney noted.
She nodded. “How about calm for a long time?”
“I could get behind that,” Rodney agreed. “Yet we’ve got this case…”
Just then Kate’s phone rang. “Morning, Simon. What’s up?”
There was an odd tone to his voice as he asked, “Do you guys ever have cases… where fighting is going on?”
“Fighting?” she repeated. “What do you mean by fighting ? As in husband and wife, domestic kind of violence stuff?”
“No, no, as in an arena for boxers only,… more like underground street fighting.”
“I’m sure underground street fighting is going on all the time, especially with people betting on it, but it’s rarely something that comes to us. Why?”
“Because I just had one of those really unpleasant visions, with me in the ring, and everybody around was screaming, Fight, fight, fight .”
“ Uh-oh ,” she muttered, “often your visions don’t mean anything even close to what we think they mean.”
“I know,” he said, “but I still got the feeling that something really ugly was going on, and it has to do with some fighting. The thing is, Kate, I don’t think that any of the people in that ring were there because they wanted to be there. I think they were there because they had no choice. The other weird thing is that it seemed that the fight, fight, fight screaming was a recording.”
She looked over at Rodney, who was frowning as he listened in on the conversation. “But…”
Simon replied, “I know. You have nothing to go on, and I don’t know that this has anything to do with you guys either.”
“In a way, I do though,” Rodney interrupted. “I was just going to tell Kate about one of the cases that came in. A body washed up downtown right off the pier where the aquabus lands,” he shared. “The body was pummeled pretty good. We haven’t got an autopsy on it yet, but one of the guys who pulled the body out of the river said the dead guy had been beaten from head to toe.”
“What do we know about the victim?” Kate asked.
“No ID was on the body, and we still haven’t figured out who he is, but the coroner did call this morning and said that he had a tentative ID. We’re waiting for dental records because there might be teeth left,” Rodney added. “The body’s that bad. The family reported him missing approximately three days ago. Apparently he’s a nice normal businessman, who goes to work every day, comes home to his kids, and all that good stuff. Then one day he just didn’t come home, and nobody knew why, but now he’s washed up in this condition, and we have no clues. However, maybe thanks to Simon’s latest vision, we have an idea at least.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Kate muttered, staring at Rodney in shock. “Simon, you take care of yourself. Just because it was you in that ring—and often we think it isn’t you—that doesn’t mean that it can’t be you.”
“Same for you,” Simon declared, “because, I swear to God, somehow I heard your voice in the middle of it.” And, with that, he hung up.