Page 20 of The Accomplice
‘She trained me at the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Delaney was my mentor, but she is more than that. We’re friends. She stuck by me …’
I glanced over my shoulder when Lake stopped talking. His eyes seemed to recall another time, another place, when fear and pain were all that he knew. The light from the dash threw an orange glow on his face, as if he were standing in front of a cold flame.
‘Sorry,’ he said, his voice shivering, the words heavy in his throat. ‘She means a lot to me, Mr. Flynn.’
I nodded. Delaney is good people. If she went out on a professional limb for Lake, then that made him, for all his slight eccentricities, good people too.
He cleared his throat, gazed through the windshield and said, ‘She’s coming back.’
Bloch got into the driver’s seat, took out her phone.
‘I trained one of the uniforms in advanced driving a few years ago. He’s cutting us in. The Sandman checked into this hotel earlier today. Swiped his card, put his bag with reception and then left. The feds thought it was a bomb. They heard ticking. Turns out it was some guy’s head in the bag. I think Bill Seong knows who it is, but these cops don’t. There are eighty patrol cars, almost every precinct, driving the city right now looking for Delaney.’
She held her cell phone higher, as if she were looking for a signal.
‘One of the patrolmen snapped a picture of the head in the bag when the forensic techs were setting up. Don’t be surprised if it’s on the front page of theNew York Postin the morning and a cop buys a new car in the afternoon.’
‘Was it him, the guy you trained, did he take the picture ?’ I asked.
‘No, but cops have a way of covering for each other. Whoever it was, once they’d sold the picture, they then shared it with the precinct WhatsApp group. And that group shared it with another group. That way if there’s an internal affairs investigation about who took the photograph and sold it to thePost– every damn cop in the city will have that image on their phone.’
‘Cops cover for cops,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘Not all of them,’ said Lake.
I wanted to ask him what he meant, but a sharppingsignaled a new message on Bloch’s phone, and that took priority.
She opened it to reveal an image.
The inside of the bag was yellow canvas. The blood stains had turned dark red. At the bottom of the bag was a man’s head. His eyes were missing. In their place were pools of bloodstained sand. In his mouth too. Black dots scattered across his face, and at first, I thought they were dried droplets of blood. Bloch pinched the screen, drew her index finger and thumb apart to widen the image. They weren’t blood drops.
‘Bugs,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Lake. ‘They’re not bugs. They’re Hymenoptera – insects. Beetles. Can I take a closer look ?’
Bloch’s eyebrow shot for the ceiling as she handed her phone to Lake in the back.
We turned around to see him enlarging the picture further, then zooming back out and in again.
‘I’d say about a centimeter long, maybe under. There’s yellow hair on these. Very distinctive. It explains why they thought the bag was ticking, I suppose.’
‘What are they ?’ I asked.
He handed Bloch her phone, leaned back in the seat.
‘They make a loud clicking sound. With enough of them together it might sound like a clock or mechanical timer. For years people didn’t think it was the beetles making that sound. They thought it was the wood they infested, cracking. But we know now, they make the sound at certain times of the year. They like old houses, with old timber frames. Most people hear them at night when they’re up and the house is quiet. They say they got their name during Irish wakes. The Irish have a vigil – someone stays with the corpse at all times, even at night, for three days. That’s when they hear the clicking – during the death watch.’
‘Deathwatch beetles,’ said Bloch. ‘You know a lot about insects.’
‘You spend your time looking for serial killers and you pick up a few things. These insects don’t feed on the dead. The Sandman put them in the bag with the guy’s head. He wanted them found.’
‘Why ?’ I asked.
‘It’s a warning,’ said Lake. ‘That sound is an omen of death.’
None of us said anything for a moment.
The silence was broken up when Bloch’s phone chimed again and again as more images came through.
