J. Kerley - The Death File - A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist

Novarro was ten steps from her front door when she noticed a centimeter-wide band of light leaking out. Ajar. A sizzle of electricity ran down her spine and she fell into a crouch, slipping her weapon from her rear waistband and creeping to the door. She put her ear to the crack, nothing. Novarro nudged the door open with her foot and peeked past the frame, smelling the sweet scent of marijuana.

“POLICE!” she yelled. “The house is surrounded. Put your hands on your head and walk to the front.”

A sound from somewhere in the rear.

“NOW!” she yelled. “OR YOU’RE DEAD!”

Seconds later a slender Native American male stepped from the hall with his hands atop a head of long black hair in a rubber-banded ponytail. He was boyishly handsome, like a man not fully formed, the face poised between pretty child and handsome adult. He wore a bead-embellished leather jacket over a white tee and blue jeans, a black concho belt around his waist, his feet in red trail runners. He stepped into the living room and pirouetted, stopping with a stumble into the wall and a broad grin aimed at Novarro.

“Jesus, Tash,” he said. “You’re such a drama queen.”

The muzzle dropped. It was Ben, her twenty-one-year-old brother. She’d given him a key months ago, regretted it a week later, but now it was his. If she asked for the key back or changed the lock, she’d be …

An Indian Giver.

Novarro blew out a breath. “I didn’t see your car outside, Ben.”

“A buddy dropped me off. We were out doin’ a li’l partying.”

Novarro heard the slur of pot and alcohol in her brother’s voice and she gave him narrowed eyes. “Your car’s at home, I hope?”

The last time this happened he’d forgotten where he’d parked.

“Fuckin’ bank came an’ got it yesterday, the bast—” He belched into his palm, “—ards.” He looked up. “’S’cuse me.”

Novarro had a mental picture of the repo man hooking up the 2001 Corolla and driving away. Six months back she’d lent – OK, given – Ben the price of the down payment plus two months of installments.

“You got behind on payments,” she sighed.

“The insur’nce was killing me, Tash.”

“Think your driving record has anything to do with it?”

“I, uh, gotta take a whizzer.” As usual when Ben didn’t like the direction of a conversation, he fled.

It was five minutes until the toilet flushed, reminding Novarro of the time the family’s commode had been leaking for a week until a nine-year-old Ben removed the tank top, stared at the mechanism as he flushed several times, then, using a bent bobby pin, fixed the toilet in thirty seconds.

“How are things at your job?” Novarro asked. “They still got you on thermostats?”

“I got tired of tinkering with little shit.” He winked. “So I disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

Novarro felt her heart drop. “Disappeared?”

“I’m the Coyote, Tasha,” Ben grinned crookedly, invoking the mythological, shape-shifting Trickster in many Native American cultures, reckless, self-involved, with a sense of humor both clownish and cruel. “I have the magic in me.”

Novarro shook her head. He’d quit or been fired. Her voice pushed toward anger, but she fought it. “You have too much liquor in you,” she said quietly.

“Me Indian,” Ben said in a cartoon voice, a distorted smile on his face. “Me like-um firewater. It make-um me big happy.”

“Don’t start that crap, Ben. It’s demea—”

“FYA-WATAH!” he whooped, jumping from the couch and beginning a stumbling circular dance, hand patting his mouth. “Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo–woo …” He paused as if taken by a sudden thought. “Me need-um a drum track here, Tash,” he slurred, moving his hands up and down like drumming. “You got-um any tom-toms?”

“I got aspirin,” she said. “Coffee.”

Her brother scowled at his choices. “Coyote need-um more firewater.” His hand flashed beneath his jacket and found a pint bottle of red liquid; his favorite grain alcohol into which he’d poured several bags of strawberry Kool-Aid. At 190proof, it was just shy of pure ethanol. Before Novarro could cross the floor it was in his mouth.

“Give me that shit,” she said, grabbing his arm. Ben spun, his hand pushing Novarro away as his lips sucked greedily at the bottle.

“I said give … me … that.” Novarro wrenched the spirits from her brother’s hand and held it beyond his reach as he grabbed wildly at the pint.

“ME NEED-UM FIREWATER!” he railed.

Novarro retreated across the floor. “You need to go to bed.”

He raised an unsteady hand, fingers opening and closing. “Gimme, gimme, Tash. Need-um bad.”

“No fucking way, Ben.”

“ IT’S MIIIINE !” he screamed, kicking over an end table and lamp. The action seemed to surprise him and he stared at the fallen furniture.

Novarro’s eyes tightened to pinpoints. “Get out, Benjamin.”

He turned to her. “Hunh?”

“There’s the door,” Novarro said, finger jabbing toward the entrance. “Get out of my house.”

It took several beats for her words to make sense. Her brother tipped forward but caught himself with hands to knees. “You can’t throw me out, Tash,” he said, taking a stutter-step sideways. “Me drunk Indian.”

“Go sleep in the goddamn alley, Geronimo. Or crawl into a trash can.”

“Don’t be mean, Tash,” her brother said in a voice closer to twelve than twenty-one. He bent to retrieve the toppled lamp but momentum carried him to the floor. He tried to push himself up, but his arms buckled and his nose slammed the carpet.

“I’m all fut up,” he wailed, face-down, fingers clawing at the rug like trying to get a grip on a spinning world. “I’M ALL FUT UP!”

“Shhhh, Ben,” Novarro said gently, slipping her hands beneath his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch.”

She wrestled her brother to the couch and got a wastebasket from the bathroom. She pulled the area rug several feet from the couch and set the wastebasket beside him as a vomit pail. He’d miss it, of course. He always did.

She sat in the chair across the room and stared at her brother, his eyes rolled back as he neared sleep. Fixing the toilet was just the start, the harbinger of an innate ability with mechanical systems that led to a job in an uncle’s garage at thirteen. His skills flourished in a high school geared to technical pursuits and he’d received a scholarship in mechanical engineering at Arizona State.

He’d dropped out one semester into the program, claiming to be bored, but Novarro suspected Ben had the same problem afflicting so many lower-class kids in college: Fear that he didn’t belong in that world, that he was insufficient, miscast, hearing whispers only spoken in the mind …

How did that one ever get in?

Despite entreaties from his university counselor and two professors – one who took Ben under her wing like a relative – her brother went to work for a company that installed industrial HVAC systems, actually a decent job, his natural abilities impressing higher-ups from day one. But from the moment he’d quit school, the drinking and pot smoking ramped up. He fell in with a loose crew of ambition-free young men content to hang out near the res and do odd jobs, selling loose joints to needy tourists the most profitable.

Three months later the accumulating hangovers and stink of liquor on Ben’s sweat and breath ended with a pronouncement from his supervisor.

“ We really like you, kid; you got an incredible gift. But you also got a problem. Get it fixed and we can …”

A succession of mechanically oriented jobs followed, diminishing in complexity, the most recent reconditioning used hot-water heaters for twelve bucks an hour, a task he claimed – usually drunkenly – that a trained chimp could learn in a day.