Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 5-1

Drayden - Chapter 5

I don’t have time to exchange any real pleasantries with the front-entry guards of my brother’s building, who are both surprised at how easily I’m able to pull open the front door without their help to unlock it.

“Hey guys. Won‘t be long,” I say as I wave and jog past them.

“Stop!” One of them yells, but I’m already at the stairwell and going in.

I close the metal door before the guards can get to me. I ram my shoulder into the door and surprise myself at how easy it is to dent the metal and jam the door. There’s no way they‘re opening it now.

I make it up the twelve flights in an instant, jumping from landing to landing, hurrying because I’m sure they’re already calling the cops.

Between now and the time I had left my brother’s place last night, the police had put new crime scene tape in front of Reginald’s door, and had also bolted it with a new padlock. That’s enough to confirm what I already know — that Professor Dmitriu is dead — but I still have to see everything for myself.

I rip the tape and kick the door open, busting the frame to splinters, and wonder if Detective Dietrich had figured out I was also in the room with the Professor. The inside of my brother’s place confirmed that my memories are sound and that everything that happened with the professor was true. The men in black who had barged into the room had been real. Evidence of at least two of the bullets remain in the wall near the computer terminal as does a circle of blood inside a taped outline of a body on the floor where the professor had been sitting. I replay the scene in my head and remember every small detail. They barge in. They fire. The bullets stream in my direction and toward the professor. Several enter his body, fragments of blood spitting into the air as they pummel into him. I remember thinking the professor was dead. I remember thinking that I was surely dead as well.

I go to the two large holes in the wall. They’re larger than bullet holes, like either the police or the men who shot at us had already removed the slugs. I pick at the chalky edge of the drywall to feel the sensation of the rough texture. I flashback to the bullets heading in my direction and somehow realize the two holes were caused by the last two bullets heading in my direction. I must have disappeared from the room right before they were to hit me, but I have no clue how that happened. How had I gotten away? How had I ended up suddenly in USC’s gym thousands of miles from here? Reginald’s computer would hopefully have those answers, but there was also another possible source of answers: Tengen. I needed to find him.

I look at the front door. There’s nobody there, but I think I heard something in the hallway. It might be one of the building guys, or it could be the cops. Either way, I’m getting my ass out of here. The quickest way to my stolen Mercedes is with gravity, so I go to the window of my brother’s bedroom and open the window. Outside the window is another building. Below me to the ground is a street bordered by a sidewalk. I see police cars with their lights flashing. People walk on the sidewalk. Cars drive on the street. And then I hear it clearly outside my brother’s front door: rushed murmurs in the hallway. The police are here.

I jump up and through the window in one smooth motion. The experience differs greatly from being pushed out of my living room window in Los Angeles. This is a lot more enjoyable because I know what the impact to the ground will feel like. I cut through the air with my arms spread out and my knees slightly bent and stay in this landing position for nearly the entire fall, thinking how badass I must look if anyone were to look up and see me. I’m halfway down when I realize the view and the beauty of the city from this high. It’s a gray day with the sun perfectly hidden by clouds. A tugboat ambles through the river with nothing to push. I look down at the quickly approaching cement sidewalk. I’m not in danger of landing on anyone, so that’s good. Also, nobody’s looking up, so that’s gonna be interesting when I show up from out of nowhere.

The balls of my feet land on the cement and accept the weight of the rest of me as my ankles, then knees, then hips, then back, bend with the force of the landing, absorbing it like I had jumped from a mere five feet up. Two women stop in awe at my sudden appearance and a third screams. Two cops near a police car hear the scream and look over. I put my hands up to the screaming woman to assure her it’s safe and when the police officers yell at me to freeze, I quickly think twice about running. If they arrest me, then maybe I can get updates from Dietrich on what he discovered since we last spoke.

I obey their instructions and put up my hands and follow one cop’s instructions to get on my knees. I let him handcuff me, put me in the police car, and take me to the station.

One of them asks me how old I am and then asks if I have an independent adult who should meet us at the station.

“No thanks," I say. “Just bring me to Detective Dietrich.”

This satisfies them enough to stop their light interrogation. On the drive over, I think about the fall and wonder if my composition and overall mass are different after putting my arm in the gray steel box. Am I lighter or am I just that much stronger?

We get to the station where they quickly process me and put me in an interrogation room where I wait with my hands cuffed behind my back. Dietrich shows up ten minutes later with a grin that says catching me had solved everything.

“You’re making my job easy,” he says.

“And here you had me thinking you were one of the smart ones,” I reply.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of our coroner.”

“You know I had nothing to do with that.”

“We found your hair near a drop of the coroner’s blood. That alone’s enough for us to hold you.”

“You found my hair? That’s it? C’mon, Dietrich, that’s thin.”

“I can replay the rest of the scenes as we know them. You broke into your brother’s condo, trash the place looking for something, trashed his office at the university, then broke into his condo again. You’ve stolen police evidence, your brother’s vehicle, beat up a parking lot security attendant and broken through police tape twice. I think we have more than enough to hold you.”

“You really think I killed my brother?”

“Did you?”

“I flew in. Check the airline travel records. God, you’re more desperate and stupid than I thought.”

“You could have hired someone. Word is, you and your brother weren’t exactly close. There are hardly any calls between you and him, and I understand there was also a bit of intellectual competition between you both.”

I feel the metal bonds around my wrists and shake my head and laugh.

“Something funny?” he asks.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t waste my time. If you know nothing, then I gotta get outta here and figure it out myself,” I say.

“We’ve got enough to keep you in for a while. Killing a coroner? No judge will grant you easy bail for that. Make yourself comfortable.”

It would be too easy to get free. But I’m not done here yet. That comment about my brother and I not being close had irked me. How dare he make that assumption. We were close. Maybe not as close as two brothers could be, but close nonetheless.

“Fine, you got me. So tell me, what did you find at my brother’s condo last night?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” he says.

“How about we take turns?”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“I could request a lawyer,” I say.

He thinks about it for six seconds. “We found blood. We found two bullets in the wall.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?” I want to know if he had found the steel box, but don’t want to bring it up if he doesn’t.

“My turn,” Dietrich says. “Where’s the laptop?”

“In a very safe place.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Then ask a better question. Or maybe I’ll ask one. How long were you going to wait before getting into my brother’s laptop? What kind of procedures include bringing it to the morgue?

“Are you saying you learned something from the laptop?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I learned that my brother was afraid for his life.”

“We were running forensic tests first,” Dietrich says.

“And how the hell did you let somebody get into the morgue and steal my brother’s corpse?”

“I was thinking you could answer that for me,” Dietrich says.

“Don’t you have cameras or some security system?”

“The system was disabled. The cameras turned off. Nothing recorded and the entire day was erased, including the time you were in the morgue.”

My level of frustration peaks. What an entire waste of time. I close my eyes and shake my head at the amount of incompetence I have to deal with. I open my eyes and look at Dietrich. “You know absolutely nothing. I can’t believe that after twenty-four hours you aren’t any further than when I first arrived.”

“Why’d you go back to your brother’s? You lost something there, didn’t you? Leave something behind?”

“Like what?” I say. I can’t tell if he’s leading me down this path because he found the steel box.

“I don’t know. Something. Something valuable or incriminating,” he says.

I don’t think he has it, and figure it can’t hurt to ask. “I’m looking for a gray-steel box. It’s heavy. Sharp edges. A hole in the middle as wide as my arm,” I say while feeling the strange new marks on my forearm through my shirt. His expression doesn’t change in the slightest.

“Why do you need it? What’s it for?” He asks.

“It belonged to my brother. It’s his, but he wanted me to have it.”

“What about the blood? We’re running tests, but I bet you know whose blood it is,” he says.

He’s trying to put me at the scene of a new crime, and what the hell. I’ll throw him a bone. There’s little more he can do to me at this point. “The blood belongs to Professor Radu Dmitriu,” I say.

The detective’s mouth drops open in surprise, and I don’t know what to make of that.

“Radu Dmitriu? You were there with him?”

“Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking, and, no, I didn’t kill him. Someone shot him. I know that much. I think it was fatal, but you didn’t find him there, did you?”

“No. He wasn’t there,” Dietrich says. He looks at the one-way glass, and I’m certain after seeing his reaction upon hearing the professor’s name that phone calls are being made in the other room.

“So did you find the steel box or not?”

“No. No steel box,” he says, contemplating with the same face he made after my mention of Radu Dmitriu. I think he’s telling me the truth. I think I know everything he knows, and so my time here is about to end.

“Who shot him?” He finally asks. “And how did you get out?”

The way he says it, it’s more of a demand than an actual question. I shake my head. “I don’t know. Guys dressed in black. Very military. Five of them. I suspect they took him. Or hell, maybe he got out on his own. Hell if I know. Nothing’s making sense right now.”

His temper flares. “How do you know this? This makes no sense! You will start telling me the truth!”

“All I know is that he saved me!” I say, matching his energy.

“This back-and-forth ends now. You’ll start from the beginning and tell me everything you know!”

“Uh uh, no more time wasting,” I say as I pull myself free of the handcuffs, drop them in front of me, and let them clang against the table for dramatic effect. Dietrich is more bewildered than if it was a magic trick because the cuffs are destroyed. I stand and move past him and turn the door handle.

“Stop!” Dietrich says behind me. I turn and see his gun aimed at my chest.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I say as I leave the room, shut the door behind me, and break the handle off so he can’t follow. I go without looking at anybody and hurry the pace of my walk as I near the building’s exit. Dietrich would soon have my picture everywhere. That meant I had to get out of public soon, and that meant priority one just became getting to my brother’s bank and accessing the money he mentioned in the video.