Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 1-1

Drayden - Chapter 1

My cellphone vibrates in the back pocket of my jeans during Introduction to Computational Biology. I shift my weight sideways, pull the phone, and glance at the number. I don’t know it, but it’s Pittsburgh. Reginald, I think. But it’s not his number. I know no one else there, so it’s probably Reginald. But that’s weird because Reginald wouldn’t call. He’d text. I ignore the call and stop it from vibrating and pretend not to notice that my professor has paused to look at me, and so have some of the students nearby. The students are jealous, I think because I’m the youngest one by far in the class. Most in this classroom are college juniors or seniors, and I just turned 16. Hell, I might be the youngest in the entire university.

My professor continues and then five seconds later my cellphone vibrates a short staccato, and I know it’s a voicemail. A pang of stress rolls up through my spine and quickly down into my gut. I think about the Russian mob. I owe them. They’re the only ones who’ve called my phone in the last week, but they’ve never once left a voicemail. I started ignoring them a few days ago because there’s nothing I can do. Paying them isn't an option. I simply don’t have the money. But I can’t tell them that. I say it’s fifty thousand dollars, but they say it’s more with the points. Truth is, at this point, it’s whatever they want it to be. Not enough sleep, too much Adderall, and two consecutive bad beats in poker is all it took to go from affording college, to worrying about getting my bones broken. Two years of healthy profits lost in a matter of forty-five minutes. They don't care that I'm young. As a matter of fact, they may like it, and that frightens me as much as anything.

I look around at the privileged students around me. Nice clothes, nice computers, sweet futures. If I had progressed through the standard educational system, I’d be a high school sophomore. Instead, I let them test me out just like Reginald did, and let them accelerate my learning, and let my mom brag about how her two sons were exceptional. Truth is, I’m probably on my way out even if the Russians don’t maim or murder me. That’s because I’m also in a little bit of trouble with the University for helping a friend with a small case of hacking an HMO’s computer system. I’m not technically a cybercriminal, but that’s the moniker the university and the FBI are using until the case advances further. It’s a long story, but I was doing the right thing for my friend. Anyway, my life is an absolute mess right now.

Class finally ends. I press the voicemail icon and listen as I follow the crowd out.

“This message is for Drayden Routton. This is Detective Dietrick of the Pittsburgh Police Department. Your brother’s university has you as the emergency contact. Please call me back as soon as you get this.”

I call back immediately and slip away from the crowd and lean against the cream-colored hallway wall. The phone is tight against my ear. It goes four long rings before he picks up.

“Dietrick here.”

“It’s Drayden Routton. Calling you back about my brother.”

“Where are you?”

“USC. Los Angeles. What happened to my brother?”

The pause seems studied. I wait.

“I’m sorry. I’m a detective with Pittsburgh homicide. Your brother Reginald is…dead.”

I’m moving down the hallway without thinking. Exiting the building. Rushing to my car. “How?” I ask.

“I’m very sorry about your loss, but I’m wondering if you can answer a few questions.”

“When did it happen?”

“Last night or early this morning. Can you—”

“What happened? Who did it? Do you have any suspects?”

“Not yet we don’t—”

“I’m on the first plane out.” I hang up on him. I have to think. The keys are in my hand, and my bag is on my shoulder, and I’m getting in the car, and I’m halfway to the airport and time skips as the anger and confusion builds, and I know I need to call Mom. I take a deep breath and dial the motorcycle shop she helps run with her newest husband. She answers on the second ring.

“Big Time Bikes, how may I help you?”

“Mom, it’s me.”

I count two seconds before she says anything.

“I’ll have to call you back. We have customers.”

“I just got off the phone with a Pittsburgh homicide detective.”

“What are you telling me?” Her voice lifts at the end. She knows what I’m saying but doesn’t want to hear it as much as I don’t want to say it.

“I’m on my way there now,” I say.

“Drayden, you call me,” she says. “As soon as you know something, you call me.”

The phone bangs like it dropped, and then the line goes dead. I fly on the first flight to Pittsburgh with my laptop and laptop bag, my cell phone, and the clothes on my back, and when I arrive at the coroner’s, Detective Dietrick is there waiting for me.

“You’re young,” Dietrick says, disappointed.

“Where is he?” I say, not caring to put up with the tone or the comment.

“I can’t. What are you like 15?” He asks.

“16. Why’s it matter. Show me,” I say, demanding. He thinks about it for a spell and holds my eye contact and finally gives in.

He leads without saying a word down dimly lit corridors. He looks back at me once as if to check my resolve. I don’t waver, and I tell him so with my eyes.

“It’s just down here,” he says and leads the rest of the way to a set of double-doors that he opens and holds for me to enter. The room is sizable and brighter with numerous tables and large metal drawers taking up most of the far wall. A man in a lab coat closely inspects a body on a table, and I think it’s Reginald. I get a terrible feeling. I slow my pace as I approach and the coroner steps back out of my way. When I see my brother, I pass out.

I come to on the floor with Detective Dietrick and the coroner bent over me. The bitterness of smelling salts lingers. I snap to and remember every detail of what I saw. It was Reginald, but it wasn’t. His face was warped and much larger than usual like I saw his reflection in a circus fun-mirror. His eyes bulged out, his cheeks were puffy, his lips were gray with death, and his right ear was knocked into his skull like a baseball bat had hit him on the side of his head. Not nearly as odd but just as confusing to me, his head was shaved bald. The rest of his body remained covered.

“Did your brother have any enemies?” Detective Dietrick asks.

“Half-brother,” I correct him with a dry mouth. “No enemies. He was a good guy. What happened to him?”

I get off the floor and move around Dietrick and go to my brother again. I think about Mom. I think that I’m not going to call her because I can’t explain this.

“A 911 call came from his condo just past midnight,” says Detective Dietrick. “Nobody said anything, so they sent a unit. They went in and found him on the floor not breathing. He was beyond help. No pulse. Banged up like you see him now.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says the coroner. “Your brother’s was the most original homicide I’ve ever seen!” He’s animated like my brother’s death is exciting the staleness of his everyday gunshot and stabbing victims or the boring suicides. I’m getting angry and must not be hiding my anger well because Dietrick takes a small step between us. “It looked like your brother was hit by a demolition ball swung by Hercules, once on the head and another at his lower torso, but that’s impossible because he was dead in the condo and there wasn’t anything there heavy or blunt enough to do the damage he sustained. And there’s no blood or mysterious fingerprints, so I think poisoning is the only real possibility because of the strange way the body morphed. But like I said, original because I’ve never seen anything like it before. Hopefully after the autopsy—”

Dietrick cuts him off. “All the windows and doors were locked, and the alarm system sounded as soon as the police broke in, so he must have locked the door himself, but I don’t know how he could’ve walked—.” The Detective cuts himself off. “Sorry.”

“Is there anything else?” I ask.

“One more thing,” Dietrick says. “He died wearing a bulletproof vest.”

He observes my reaction. Once satisfied at my disbelief he pulls out a 13-inch silver laptop in a clear plastic evidence bag. “This was tucked underneath the vest.” It looks very similar to my own but with more wear and slightly more robust. Also inside is a cord with six thick pins at the end of it.

“What’s the cord?” I look closely at the plug because I’ve never seen anything like it.

“It was next to the computer,” Dietrick answers. “Our technicians haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.”

“Was there anything else?” I ask.

The coroner answers while putting the evidence bag with the laptop and the mysterious cord on a metal tray next to my brother’s body. “The keys to his Range Rover were near his outstretched hand.”

I need access to my brother’s computer cause I don’t trust the cops to get anything useful out of it. Their technicians couldn’t be very good. At least, they’re not as good as me.

“What do you know about your brother’s tattoo?” Dietrick asks.

“He doesn’t have one,” I say confidently. Reginald had never gotten one and neither had I. He had never wanted one, whereas I had never found that one thing that meant enough to permanently ink myself. As the coroner unzips the plastic, I’m sure he’s going to reveal some stupid little drank-too-much mark of shame. Instead, he reveals patterned dark marks on the underside of Reginald’s wrist and forearm. Twenty steel-gray dots line up in a pattern four wide and five long, perfectly-distanced from each other. Around the edge of each dot is a thin metal ring the color of liquid mercury. “That’s new,” I tell them. “He didn’t have that when I last saw him a year ago.”

“The skin appears indented,” the coroner says.

I look more closely and see what he means. The holes in his forearm are precisely that — holes. I don’t know much about tattoos or body markings, but these dots appear to have been a painful venture.

“I want to be alone with him,” I say. The detective and the coroner look at each other. “Please,” I insist. The coroner nods.

“You have one minute,” Dietrick says.

They round the corner and leave me alone with Reginald. I waste no time. The evidence bag holding my brother’s laptop is stiff and crinkly and loud. I open it as quickly and quietly as I can and remove the laptop and the mysterious cord inside. I take my laptop and cable out of my bag, put it inside the evidence bag, seal it, and put it back on the shelf. I put his computer and mysterious cord into my bag and shuffle it back on my shoulder. I take a deep breath and put a hand near my brother’s body.

“What the hell, Reginald? Why didn’t you call me?”

Detective Dietrich and the coroner come from around the corner.

“I want to see his condo,” I say. “I want to see where you found him.”

“No. It’s a crime scene,” says Detective Dietrich. If my mother were here, she’d tell them that refusing me is a waste of words. She’d say something exactly like: “Well, there you go. Now nothing’s going to keep him out just because you told him not to.” She’d roll her eyes and shake her disapproving head at me, look at her perfectly polished fingernails, and then possibly check to see if she had a smudge on her expensive shoes. She had stopped saying ‘no’ to me when I was about ten, at which time she tried reverse psychology, and then straight-up threatening psychology, followed by threats, belt-beatings without the warning of a threat, until she just got so tired of everything that she gave up on parenting me altogether. But she never gave up on Reginald. He was her #1.

I pretend to acquiesce. "Call me if you find anything out.”

“Where are you planning to stay?” Detective Dietrich asks.

“Don’t know yet. Call me on my cell. I’ll keep it on,” I said, thinking they had already given me all the information they had and whatever had happened to my brother was my problem to figure out.

I leave the morgue and order an Uber and go directly to Reginald’s condo. In the car, I call mother and this time she answers after half a ring. She says nothing. She knows it’s me and after five seconds of silence I simply say, ‘Sorry.’ The word barely makes it out of my throat, and it’s the only time I can remember getting emotional with her. That one word is enough for her to cry hysterically until she hangs up the phone without anything else said. He was my half-brother, but he was her full-son, and I know as I look at her contact in my phone that she’s never going to recover from this. And I know I won’t either. The image of his warped face flashes back into my memory, and it fills me with anger and denial. Someone did that to him. Someone hurt him. Someone is going to pay.