Brian Freeman - The Crooked Street

Then his eyes shot to the ceiling as the timbers of the old house groaned over his head. Someone was upstairs.

The hinges of the master bedroom door squealed as the intruder pushed it open. Frost could have told whoever it was that they were making a mistake. He waited. It didn’t take long. Above him, he heard the unmistakable hiss of an angry cat and a throaty growl that meant Shack was on the hunt. Someone howled in pain, and footsteps thundered in retreat from the bedroom. A man practically threw himself down the stairs to get away from Shack, and Frost launched across the floor, colliding with the man’s shoulder and knocking him to the carpet. He stood over him, his gun pointed at the man’s face, which bled in thin stripes from a swipe of the cat’s claws. The short, plump man threw his hands above his head in surrender.

“Who the hell are you?” Frost demanded.

The man winced at the stinging wounds on his face. “Holy crap, is that some kind of tiger you’ve got up there? You should have a warning on your door. That thing could have killed me.”

Shack took that opportunity to hop happily down the stairs. He climbed up Frost’s soaking-wet jeans and planted himself calmly on Frost’s shoulder and began licking his face to welcome him home. The tuxedo cat was full grown but unusually small, barely a foot from nose to tail; he had a black stomach with a single white stripe and white cheeks with a black chin. His tail was short, and he had stubby little ears.

“Meet the tiger,” Frost said. “Now, who are you?”

“My name’s Coyle. Dick Coyle.”

“Do you have ID?”

“Sure I do. Look, I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but could you stop pointing that gun at me? I’m not armed. And I’m not a thief.”

“Then why’d you break into my house, Coyle?”

“Hey, I’m sorry about that. It was stupid, I know. I rang the bell, but you weren’t home. Sometimes I can’t resist showing off my lockpick skills. I figured I’d be in and out before you were back.”

“And why exactly do you know how to pick locks?” Frost asked.

“I’m a private detective,” the man replied.

Frost groaned loudly as he holstered his weapon. If there was one thing he had no time for, it was private detectives. They all thought they were Sam Spade living in 1920s San Francisco. Frost stretched out a hand and helped Coyle back to his feet. The man eyed Shack nervously but didn’t protest as Frost steered him to the dining room and dropped him down in one of the wooden chairs.

“ID,” Frost repeated.

Coyle pushed his wallet across the table. His driver’s license showed that he was twenty-six years old with an address in an industrial section of town. Coyle’s dark hair was already thinning, and he had it greased over his head with a part on the side. He had skimpy stubble pretending to be a beard and deer-in-the-headlights brown eyes. His face was full, round, and flushed, and Shack had made sharp cuts down the side of his forehead. He wore a chocolate-colored mock turtleneck and khakis, both in extra-large sizes to accommodate his heavy frame.

Frost went into the kitchen and dampened a towel in the sink. He returned to the dining room and handed it to the detective, who dabbed it gingerly against the wounds on his head.

“Okay, Coyle, tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you,” Frost said.

“Because we’re both doing the same thing. Investigating a murder.”

Frost shook his head. Another Sam Spade. “Whose murder?”

“Denny Clark.”

“How do you know Denny? Was he a client of yours or something?”

“No, I never met him.”

“Then why are you so interested in his murder?” Frost asked.

Coyle pursed his thick pale lips and shot covert glances in both directions. He leaned across the table. “Is this room secure?”

“What?”

“Do I need to worry about bugs?”

Frost was ready to laugh, but then he thought about Denny Clark being killed with the kind of poison that was usually reserved for spies. And about hidden cameras on a multimillion-dollar yacht. And about Captain Hayden showing up at the crime scene in the middle of the night. He decided to indulge the detective’s paranoia. He synched his phone to the Bose speakers in the dining room and played Bastille’s “Pompeii” at a loud volume.

Frost crooked a finger at Coyle and spoke softly with the music thumping in the background. “Talk.”

Coyle used a conspiratorial whisper. “This murder isn’t what you think.”

“Then what is it?”

“There’s a serial killer working in the city,” Coyle told Frost. “He’s been at it for years, but nobody knows about him except me. He’s the one who murdered Denny Clark, and I can prove it.”

Frost needed to get out of his wet clothes. He didn’t think that Coyle was going to run, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He handcuffed the private investigator to the iron railing on the patio while he went upstairs to take a shower. When he’d changed, he returned to the patio and released him.

“So is it safe to talk outside?” Frost asked with a sarcastic smile. “No bugs?”

Coyle rubbed the kinks out of his wrist where the cuff had pinched his skin. “I guess it’s okay.”

“Then tell me what you were looking for inside my house.”

It wasn’t entirely accurate to call it his house. The house actually belonged to Shack, which made it one of the odder living arrangements in the city. Frost had adopted the cat from an older woman who’d been killed in the upstairs bedroom, and her will had made the house available nearly rent-free to whoever agreed to keep Shack there. So Frost now had a home in an exclusive neighborhood that wasn’t really his home at all.

“You won’t believe me when I tell you,” Coyle replied.

“Try me.”

“A snake,” Coyle said.

“A snake? Why would you expect to find a snake in the house? And what does this have to do with a serial killer?”

“It’s not a real snake. It’s a painting of a snake. It’s not large, maybe a foot by a foot, and it’s always done in red spray paint. Wherever this killer strikes, he leaves the same kind of snake painting near the crime scene. It’s like his calling card. So far, I’m the only one who’s figured it out.”

Frost had no time for conspiracy theories. “That sounds pretty crazy, Coyle.”

“I know it does. I didn’t believe it at first, either.”

“How many of these snakes have you found?”

“Eleven,” Coyle replied.

“Eleven?” Frost exclaimed, unable to hide his surprise.

“That’s right. Eleven victims, eleven snakes.”

Frost rubbed his beard and studied the earnest naivete on Coyle’s face. The detective still sounded crazy, but the number eleven had Frost’s attention. “Well, do you have any idea who this so-called serial killer is?”

“No. Some killers like the chase, but not this one. He’s smart. He doesn’t brag to the cops or the media about what he’s doing. I haven’t identified any pattern in how he picks his victims. The only thing each murder has in common is the snake he leaves behind.”

Frost wandered to the edge of the patio, which looked north toward the city and the bay. A few early morning sailboats dotted the blue water. “Did you find a snake painting inside my house?”

“No, but your cat interrupted me before I was done searching,” Coyle said, grimacing as he pressed the towel to the cuts on the side of his forehead. “Look, give me fifteen minutes. We can go over the whole place together. If we don’t find anything, fine, I was wrong. But I don’t think I am. Denny Clark is the latest victim of this killer. If he was murdered here, there’s a snake close by.”