“Police, open up!” Levi shouted, banging on the door to Apartment 3B.
Martine stood next to him, sleepy after being roused from bed but still ready for action. He heard rustling and thumping inside the apartment, then silence.
Slamming his fist against the door again, he said, “Open this door right now or I’ll break it down.”
Across the hall, the door to 3C creaked open, and an elderly man’s face peeked out to glare at them. Martine shooed him back inside.
Footsteps sounded inside 3B, but nothing else happened. Then, just as Levi was about to step back and kick, the door opened the tiniest sliver.
“Julie Emerson,” he said, “We have a warrant for your arrest as well as one to search your apartment.”
“What for?” she asked, though her face was ghostly pale and her lower lip was trembling.
“I have evidence that you drugged and robbed a man named Geoffrey Rhodes earlier this evening. And I’m guessing that the Rohypnol in Diana Kostas’s house belonged to you as well.”
She glanced over her shoulder, muscles tensing as if preparing to take flight.
Levi placed his hand on the butt of his gun. “Please don’t.”
A few fraught seconds ticked by while he wondered if she was really going to make him force his way into the apartment at gunpoint. Before the situation reached critical mass, however, she let out a sob and opened the door the rest of the way.
Martine entered first, gesturing for Julie to turn around and put her hands behind her back. “I’ll bring her down to the car while you start the search,” she said to Levi.
He nodded. Martine handcuffed Julie and read her rights while she escorted her out of the apartment, leaving the door open.
His nose wrinkled as he looked around the small, messy space. He couldn’t help contrasting it to Kostas’s cute house in Henderson. The two women worked for the same elite escort agency, and Julie had to be pulling a similar income. What was she doing living in a shithole like this, or rolling random johns in fleabag motels?
He checked the handful of rooms to ensure Julie had been home alone, then returned to the main living/dining area. Clothes were tossed haphazardly over the mismatched furniture; empty beer cans and used paper plates littered the coffee table and even the floor. He had to navigate around actual piles of trash as he started his search.
A dozen baggies of pot, coke, and Ecstasy tablets were sitting in plain view on the dining room table, which saved him a lot of time and energy. Rolling his eyes, Levi tagged them and moved on, running through a mental checklist of criminals’ most favored hiding spots.
His search brought him to the small galley style kitchen, which was tucked in a corner off the dining area with a wall separating it from the living room. He rummaged through the cabinets and drawers, but it wasn’t until he opened the freezer that he hit the jackpot. Buried underneath packages of pizza rolls and fish sticks was an enormous freezer bag full of wallets.
He unzipped the bag and flipped through a few of them. They’d been emptied of cash, but the driver’s licenses, cards, and even photographs were all still intact.
A simple thief would have taken the cash, maybe a few credit cards, and dumped everything else far from their home. If Julie had risked keeping this stuff, she was probably dabbling in identity theft as well.
Levi went rigid at a creaking noise from the room beyond. He looked up just in time to see a big, burly man rounding the corner into the kitchen.
“Motherfucker,” the man spat, lunging toward him.
Levi dropped the freezer bag and wrenched the refrigerator door open as a shield. When the man ran headlong into it and bounced off, Levi slammed the door shut and threw a defensive front kick with all the power in his hips, driving his foot into the man’s chest. Though it didn’t knock the man down, he did reel backward out of the kitchen, coughing.
Levi had to get clear of this literal dead end he was trapped in. He darted out at an angle, grabbing the nearest dining chair and tossing it in the man’s path before drawing his gun.
“Police,” he said. “I have a warrant to be here. If you don’t stop, I will shoot you.”
“Is that right, pig?” The man kicked the chair out of his way, though he didn’t come any closer.
Levi stood his ground in a two-handed stance, his gun aimed at center mass. Then he blinked, and he was no longer in that dingy apartment. He was in the lobby of the Tropicana, at the center of a storm of chaos, boiling over with fury and horror as he prepared to kill Dale Slater.
Another blink, and he was in a crowded alcove in the ER, watching history repeat itself as a desperately ill and terrified Keith Chapman took a rookie cop hostage in the moments before he turned his gun on himself.
Levi shook his head, trying to dispel the images. If this man charged him with clear intent to continue his attack, Levi was supposed to shoot him.
But if he did that, the man could die, and what then? Another life on Levi’s conscience? More endless weeks of nightmares and flashbacks and suffocating remorse?
Or worse—what if none of that happened? What if killing someone was easier the second time around?
Perhaps sensing Levi’s paralyzed indecision, the man snatched several baggies off the dining table and whipped them at his face. Levi flinched under the rain of pills and pot, and had a moment to be grateful none of them contained coke before the man came barreling toward him at full speed.
In the split second Levi had to react, muscle memory took over. He threw a high front kick, the heel of his foot smashing into the underside of the man’s chin and decisively halting his momentum. The man bellowed in pain and collapsed to the floor.
Shifting his gun to his right hand, Levi went for his cuffs—but the man wasn’t as incapacitated as he’d assumed, and he didn’t see the metallic glint of the blade until it was too late.
The knife shot out, scoring a deep cut into the back of Levi’s hand. He yelped, reflexively dropping his gun, but he had no time to recover it. Even as the man rose to his feet, the knife came swooping toward Levi’s guts in a low underhand stab.
Levi hollowed his body out and slammed his left forearm down to block the strike; the blade halted mere inches from his shirt. Before the man could draw back for another try, Levi slipped his arm around the man’s, wrapping it up and trapping it against his own chest. With the man’s stabbing arm locked out, Levi grabbed him at the shoulder and kneed him in the groin.
The man grunted, hunching forward. Levi peeled off to the side, twisting the knife out of his hand and kicking him in the face for good measure as he disengaged.
Straightening up, the man grinned at him through bloodied teeth, unfazed. Levi noticed how blown his pupils were and groaned—this guy was high as a kite.
He hated fighting intoxicated people. Their judgment, their sense of self-preservation, their capacity to feel pain, all of it was compromised. A couple of solid punches wouldn’t do the trick here.
The man came at him swinging, not in the style of a trained fighter but more like a schoolyard bully who’d never developed beyond the playground. Still, he was a big guy, and there was considerable power behind his wild blows. Levi dodged and blocked and counterattacked with the knife, raising thin red lines all over the man’s arms and hands, but he was relentless.
Nothing was worse than fighting with knives; they turned every situation into a total clusterfuck. Every second this blade was in play, there was a chance it could be taken away or turned against him. He couldn’t even fully commit to using it, because he just wasn’t willing to stab an intoxicated man.
If he could get to his gun, he could shoot the man in the knee or the foot and end this without a fatality. He had to do it soon, because he was going to burn out before the man lost his drug-fueled steam.
The man stood in-between him and the place the gun had fallen. Levi chambered his right leg, intending to unleash a flurry of swift kicks to create space.
Unfortunately, the man was wise to him by now. When Levi kicked, the man absorbed it with a grunt and hooked his arm around Levi’s leg. Grabbing Levi’s waist with his other hand, he lifted Levi in the air and hurtled forward, throwing him onto his back on the dining table with a bone-rattling crash.
Levi coughed, the wind knocked out of him, and lost the knife in his shock. He still had enough presence of mind to draw his knees up to his chest, keeping his legs between himself and the man so the man couldn’t bear down on him with all his weight.
As they struggled, the man threw a punch too fast for Levi to avoid; it connected solidly with his mouth, splitting his lower lip against his teeth. Then both of the man’s hands closed around his neck.
Not hesitating for a second, Levi jabbed his fingers hard into the notch at the base of the man’s throat. The flinch from that form of contact was reflexive, not tied to a pain response, and the man’s hold loosened enough for Levi to release the choke with an explosive plucking motion. Because he already had his legs coiled up, he was able to smash his feet into the man’s chest forcefully enough to send him staggering away.
He couldn’t give the man any quarter; nothing short of a knockout was going to take him down. Levi leapt off the table, picked up one of the rickety wooden chairs, and hit the man with it, battering him over and over again until the thing fell to pieces.
Still the guy managed to stay on his feet.
“Oh, come on,” Levi groaned. He could see his gun; it wasn’t far. He circled around, edging into the living room—
And lost his footing in the trash strewn across the floor, falling hard against the arm of the couch.
The man pounced. Levi barely managed to block an incoming punch, then lashed out with a desperate kick to the groin. The man grimaced but didn’t so much as buckle.
Fuck—
Martine ran in through the door, absorbed the situation in a split second, and kicked the man in the back of the knee. Crying out more in surprise than pain, he collapsed to the other knee, his hands touching down for balance.
Levi didn’t waste any time. He blasted the man with the most vicious hook punch he could muster and followed it with an uppercut.
The man was still upright, though he was dazed and swaying, his eyelids fluttering. Martine planted her foot in his back and pushed him forward onto his face, then followed him down and knelt between his shoulder blades while she handcuffed him.
Wiping the back of his uninjured hand over the blood streaming from his mouth, Levi heaved himself off the couch.
“Two for the price of one,” Martine said happily.
“He made me do it,” Julie said, giving Levi a pleading look across the metal table. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me,” he said.
She raked her fingers through her disheveled blonde hair. He’d had her uncuffed for the time being, hoping it would make her more comfortable and loosen her lips.
Unsurprisingly, the man who’d attacked him in Julie’s apartment had turned out to be her notorious boyfriend Kyle Gilmore. He and Martine had let them both cool their heels—and in Gilmore’s case, sober up—at the Clark County Detention Center overnight, then transported them to the substation the next morning for interrogation.
“Kyle’s never been able to hold a job for very long,” she said. “It’s not his fault. He just—he’s a passionate man. He feels things very deeply. People don’t get that about him.”
Controlling his expression, Levi nodded for her to continue.
“But we tend to go through money really quickly. It was Kyle’s idea to start rolling tourists; he would get me the drugs and find the guys. I didn’t want to do it.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Uh . . .” She hesitated, chewing on her lower lip. “No.”
A toddler would have been able to tell she was lying. Confronting her about it would be pointless, though, so Levi didn’t bother. “Then why go along with it?”
Julie looked down at her hands, where she was worrying one of her cuticles into a bloody mess. “We needed the money. I know it was wrong, but those men were rich assholes who were usually cheating on their wives or girlfriends. It’s not like they were innocent victims.”
“Did the Rohypnol we found in Diana’s house belong to you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It was in my purse that first day you and your partner came to her house. I thought you might search me, and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, so I hid it under the bathroom sink. She had no idea it was there.”
Well, at least that should get Kostas off the hook for Hensley’s murder, but it would come at the cost of discovering what a shitty friend she had in Julie. This was just not her week.
“What made you go after Geoffrey Rhodes?” Levi asked.
Julie frowned. “I told you, Kyle always picked the guys. He was out last night, but he texted me Geoffrey’s photo and where to find him. Said he was a prick with a lot of money who’d make an easy mark—and he was right.”
Sitting back abruptly in his chair, he stared at her while he processed what she’d said. He had a hard enough time accepting the coincidence that the break in his case had come from Dominic’s own investigation. To learn that Julie had been deliberately aimed in Rhodes’s direction—what were the chances?
Perhaps sensing his disbelief, she leaned forward on the table and said, “The texts are still on my phone. You have it, right? You can see for yourself.”
“I’ll check it out.”
As he gathered his notes, preparing to leave, she said, “Did Kyle do that to your face?”
He lifted a self-conscious hand to his mouth. An angry purple bruise had bloomed in the lower left corner since last night, and the cut on his lip was still raw and red.
“I’ve had worse,” he said.
After a brief check-in with Martine, who hadn’t been able to get anything out of Gilmore, and a quick examination of Julie’s cell phone, Levi headed into the adjacent interrogation room to take a crack at Gilmore himself. According to Martine, he was claiming to have no memory of the night before—which wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, between the drugs and multiple blows to the head.
Gilmore sat slumped in his chair, handcuffs threaded through the loop at the edge of the table. He looked like he’d had a rough comedown, his eyes bloodshot and his face mottled with the bruises Levi had given him in return. A bandage was taped over the bridge of his broken nose; more bandages swathed his arms and hands, covering the lacerations from the knife.
His amnesia story couldn’t be totally true, because recognition crossed his face when he saw Levi. Smirking, he said, “Nice fat lip you’ve got there.”
“Have you looked in a mirror today?” Levi asked, gesturing to the two-way glass.
Gilmore rolled his eyes. “You know, whatever that little bitch told you—”
“Shut your mouth,” Levi said coldly. He approached the table but didn’t sit, just set down Julie’s cell. “You think I haven’t seen a hundred assholes just like you sitting in that chair? You’re bitter and resentful; you think the world owes you something, so you feel free to take whatever you want. You binge drink, you get high, you steal and gamble away your girlfriend’s money, and then exploit her to get your hands on more. You’re a toxic, manipulative leech.”
Gilmore’s nostrils flared as he glowered at Levi. “I wasn’t anywhere near her when she rolled that guy.”
“But you told her to do it. Went as far as to pick out the specific man and tell her where to find him.”
“What? No I fucking didn’t!”
Levi called up the texts on Julie’s phone and pushed it across the table. Gilmore peered down at it, and his face twisted.
“I didn’t send these,” he said.
“You really expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t remember anything that happened last night!”
Levi crossed his arms. “I know you remember me.”
“I . . .” Clenching his jaw, Gilmore exhaled harshly through his nose. “Look, most of last night is a blur. I was hanging at a bar with my buddies, I felt weird, and next thing I know I’m waking up in jail. I only remember bits and pieces in-between, crazy flashes of stuff.”
“You said you felt weird—weird how?”
“Weird like fucked up, man, and not in a way the shit I’d taken would make me feel. I swear to God someone slipped me something.”
“Why would anyone want to drug you?” Levi said with a snort.
“Fuck if I know. Maybe they got the wrong drink by accident. Felt like Special K with a goddamn angel dust chaser.”
A chill ran down Levi’s spine. “You think somebody slipped you ketamine?”
“Not just that, but yeah, I was definitely lost in the K-hole for a while there.”
Levi stood motionless while the floor seemed to fall away beneath him. An abusive douchebag drugged with ketamine, fake texts that had driven the exact person Levi needed right into Dominic’s path . . . this was no coincidence.
The Seven of Spades had set this up.
When Levi returned to the bullpen, Dominic was sitting at his desk, deep in conversation with Martine.
“Whoa,” Dominic said, springing out of the chair as he saw Levi coming. He caught Levi’s chin and turned his face into the light, then glanced down at his torn knuckles and bandaged hand. “What happened to you?”
“Ran into a door?” Levi said.
Dominic arched an eyebrow.
“Got into a knife fight,” Levi admitted. He braced himself for the reprimands that were sure to start flying. Every time he’d been injured in the line of duty, Stanton had nagged and guilted him about it for days afterward. You need to be more careful, don’t you know how much I worry about you, how do you expect me to sleep at night—
Dominic laughed, released his chin, and slapped his shoulder. “I’d hate to see the other guy,” he said, before turning back to Martine.
Levi blinked, his mouth half-open. It took him a few seconds to realize Martine was addressing him.
“Sorry, what?” he said.
“I said, did you have better luck with Gilmore than I did?”
“Yes.” It was impossible to soften what he had to say, so he just laid it out. “The Seven of Spades is responsible for this.”
“What?” Martine and Dominic said at the same time but in very different tones—Dominic concerned, Martine incredulous.
Levi relayed Gilmore’s story and his own conclusions. “There is no way this situation wasn’t deliberately engineered,” he said when he’d finished. “And there’s only one person who would do that.”
Dominic was quiet, a line etched between his brows and his eyes unfocused. Martine, on the other hand, regarded Levi with clear irritation.
“Levi, come on,” she said. “Do you hear yourself? You’re saying that a serial killer—who almost everyone believes is dead, by the way—helped you catch a criminal related to an ongoing investigation.”
“It’s not unprecedented. The Seven of Spades exposed Loretta Kane’s history of taking bribes for generous plea deals.”
“Yeah, after he slit her throat in her living room!”
“Why is it so important for you not to believe me about this?” His tone came out embarrassingly plaintive. But it hurt that Martine, who had always been on his side, stood with everyone else when it came to the Seven of Spades.
She dropped her gaze to her desk and took a deep breath. Then she looked back up and said, “Because I’m terrified of what it would mean.”
“You think I’m not?”
“I know you are. But you’re also intrigued by the challenge. An elusive, seemingly omniscient killer who helps the police catch criminals while getting away with their own vigilante-style murders? That speaks to something in you.”
Levi had no response for that. As always, Martine’s assessment was painfully accurate.
“It doesn’t speak to anything in me except horror,” she said. “Thinking there might be someone this intelligent and ruthless out there watching us and pulling our strings like puppets—just the idea of it makes me want to move my family out of this city and never look back.”
An uncomfortable silence fell and stretched out. Levi had never been able to navigate emotional confrontations well, and even though he knew Martine wasn’t angry with him, his first instinct was still to escape this conversation in any way possible.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Dominic asked, breaking the tension. He still had a distracted air about him.
“I don’t think so, but thanks,” said Levi. “Just be on your guard.”
“Okay.” Dominic inclined his head in a wordless request for Levi to move with him to the side of the room. Once they had a relative degree of privacy, he said, “Are we still on for tonight, or would you rather reschedule?”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be tonight than with you,” Levi said honestly.
Dominic’s warm brown eyes crinkled at the corners. “I was thinking a quiet night in, since you’re probably looking at a long day. Maybe I could cook you dinner at your place?”
“That sounds amazing.” Levi pulled his key ring out of his pocket. “Here, you should take the key in case I end up running late.”
He worked his apartment key off the ring and handed it over. When Dominic started to move away, Levi put a hand on his arm.
“You can kiss me,” he said.
There was always the chance that Dominic’s discretion stemmed less from respect for Levi’s boundaries and more from his own reservations about kissing a cop in the middle of a crowded police station. Knowing Dominic, however, Levi seriously doubted that was the case.
Sure enough, Dominic smiled and leaned down, pressing a gentle kiss to the uninjured side of Levi’s mouth. A wolf whistle sounded from the bullpen, which Levi knew without looking came from Jonah Gibbs. He gave the man the finger and received scattered laughter in response.
“See you tonight,” Dominic said as he pulled back. “Text me if you need me.”
Levi watched him walk away before returning to his desk. Martine was intent on her computer, and he was happy to avoid another argument, so he said nothing as he settled in to work.
Julie and Gilmore were both waiting for their public defenders; it was a coin flip as to whether the lawyers would show up before they were transported back to the CCDC. The deciding factor would be who was busier today. In the meantime, he could call Leila Rashid about dropping the charges against Diana Kostas.
His desk phone rang as he reached for it. He picked it up and said, “Detective Abrams.”
“Hi, Detective. This is Officer Jason Tanaka from the Baltimore PD. Sorry I wasn’t able to return your call last night.”
“It’s no problem. Thanks for getting back to me. I just wanted to confirm that you were the officer who delivered the news of Dr. Stephen Hensley’s death to his next of kin.”
“Sure was. Sunday the twenty-fourth, 3.30 p.m., 402 East Highfield Road. Spoke to his son, Dr. Stephen Hensley, Jr.”
Levi sat up straight. “His son? Not his wife?”
“Nope,” said Tanaka. “She wasn’t home. Her son said he hadn’t seen her since the day before.”