Superhero Detective Series (Book 5): Accused Hero Read online

  I opened the bourbon and poured a few splashes into my coffee. I took an experimental sip. It was much better than drinking the brew black. The alcohol would take some of the edge off the caffeine. I wanted to be awake, but there was no need to be a fanatic about it.

  I settled down at my small kitchen table with my fortified coffee. I unfurled the newspaper. “Unmasked Hero Arrested for Wife’s Murder,” shrieked the above-the-fold, front-page headline. Clearly Massive Force had kept his word about turning himself in. Right under the headline was a picture of Ethan Lamb, out of costume, in handcuffs, and being placed into an Astor City police SUV outside of police headquarters. His face looked even more ragged than it had when I had seen him last night. His eyes were haunted and held ill-concealed humiliation and fear. Next to that picture was an older one of Ethan in his Massive Force costume in a happier time. Well, a happier time for him if not for Nightmare, the Rogue Ethan was shown punching in the photo.

  There was a picture of Sabrina Lamb too. The caption said the photo was taken a little over a year ago at the wedding of a friend. Sabrina had been a bridesmaid at the wedding, and she was dressed in one of those eyeball scorching monstrosities brides liked to put their bridesmaids in to make themselves look better by comparison. For the same reason, I often opened a can of Vienna sausages when I was about to have sex. Sabrina was a pretty brunette on the heavy side, with milky white skin and a wide toothy grin despite the eyesore she wore. The ruffled, brightly colored dress made her look like a piñata.

  I read the front-page article about Ethan’s surrender to the police and his arraignment, scheduled to take place today. I knew one of the associate editors of the Times, a guy by the name of Stan Langley. Stan had been in the newspaper business for so long, he had probably written an eyewitness account of General Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomattox. Stan had old-school journalistic ethics and always made sure every side got a fair shake in the articles he edited. Stan clearly had not worked on the front-page story I read. That article all but said that Ethan was as guilty as a priest found in a whorehouse. The article threw in just enough “suspected killer”s and “accused murderer”s to describe Ethan that it probably managed to stay on the winning side of a defamation lawsuit, but it was a near thing.

  After reading the article, one was left with the impression that the state should stop wasting everyone’s time and hurry up and execute Ethan already. I didn’t know if the reporter had an ax to grind with Ethan—we Heroes collected enemies the way others collected belly button lint—or if the evidence against Ethan was simply so overwhelming it was impossible to put a neutral spin on it.

  I noted with interest that one of the murder investigators involved in the case was Glenn Pearson, a homicide detective I had dealt with before. The article’s author had sought a quote from Glenn. “No comment,” was the response. Glenn’s always been a talkative bastard.

  The only person who spoke up for Ethan’s innocence was, predictably, his lawyer. “Mr. Lamb had nothing to do with his wife’s death,” Foote was quoted as saying. “He looks forward to his day in court where he is confident he will be acquitted of all charges.” Well, what else was Foote supposed to say? He couldn’t say something like, “My client is guilty as sin, but I’ll still happily pocket the five hundred and fifty dollars an hour he’s paying me. Yacht payments ain’t cheap. They’re not giving those things away.”

  After finishing the front-page article about Ethan, I read the other articles about him. There were plenty. After all, it was not every day a Hero was unmasked and accused of murder. This was big news. The entire A and B sections of the Times had essentially become the Massive Force Times.

  One article was an interview with a U.S. Representative from Maryland who planned to introduce a bill in the next session of Congress to repeal the Hero Act. “Ethan Lamb killing his wife proves what I’ve been saying for years: Metahumans are a menace,” Congressman Ghant said in the article. “By giving some of them licenses to act as so-called Heroes, we’re giving licenses to the fox to guard the henhouse. Instead of allowing Metas to use their powers, we ought to outlaw them altogether in the interest of public safety.” I scowled as I read his words. I had a case involving Ghant a few years back. I knew his biggest campaign donors were police unions. Thanks to all the crime-busting Heroes did, the budgets of police departments around the country had been cut more and more over the years. Cops on the street were mostly all right, but some of their higher-ups would have been more than happy to see crime rates go through the roof and have cops’ funding and their play money restored by abolishing the Hero system. Serve and protect, but only so long as the right pockets got lined.

  Thanks to the coffee and the boost to my cynicism, I felt alert enough to deal with the wider world. I got up, grabbed Foote’s business card, and gave his office a call. I made an appointment with his secretary to meet with him in two days and so he could pay me to begin work.

  Until then, I did not have much to do. I had no other active cases. I sat in my dark living room for a while, drinking cup after cup of coffee laced with bourbon. I thought of Ethan’s dead wife and child. The newspaper did not identify the sex of the unborn child, though surely the cops knew that after performing an autopsy on the seven months pregnant woman.

  Thinking of dead children naturally led me to think again about Clara Barton. She was never far from my thoughts, hovering on the edge of my consciousness like a dark ghost.

  After a while, to my great disgust, I stopped drinking coffee and started drinking straight bourbon, right out of the bottle. I could not seem to help myself.

  I sat there, thinking and drinking and full of self-loathing, until I stopped thinking altogether.

  CHAPTER 4

  I knocked on Detective Glenn Pearson’s open office door. His bulging eyes looked up from his desk. I smiled at him. He frowned at me. I refused to let it hurt my feelings. No dark cloud could rain on my parade.

  It was two days after Massive Force had turned himself in to the police. I had just left Foote’s office where I had a long candid talk with him about Ethan’s case. As a result, I felt less than optimistic about Ethan’s innocence and his fate. A sizable certified check that constituted my retainer was burning a hole in my pocket. I felt very optimistic about the fate of my bank balance.

  “I come bearing gifts,” I said.

  “Donuts?” the stout homicide detective asked hopefully.

  “A cop asking for donuts? Don’t be such a stereotype. My gift is better than donuts. Try again.”

  “Just what I wanted, to play Twenty Questions. It’s a good thing people in the city have stopped killing one another so I can focus my attention and spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned money on fooling around with you.”

  “Sarcasm is beneath the august dignity of a homicide detective.” I settled in the cheap metal chair across the desk from Glenn. His office had cinder block walls and was tiny, cluttered, and adorned by nothing that didn’t directly relate to police work. Martha Stewart would’ve pulled her hair out at the sight. “Did I say gifts? I should’ve said I come bearing a gift, singular.” I paused dramatically, sitting up straight. “It’s me. Seeing me is your gift. I thought about putting a bow on my head before deciding against it. Too ostentatious.” I waved my hands around my body like a showgirl coming onstage. With effort, I suppressed a triumphant Ta-da! “Do you like your present?”

  Glenn made a face like he’d gotten a whiff of an outhouse on a hot summer day. “Take your gift back where you got it from. I don’t want it.” That Glenn, such a kidder. I suspected he was my biggest fan, but he hid it so well, it was hard to tell.

  “Now I know that’s not true,” I said. “Your mouth says no while your eyes say yes.”

  Glenn’s eyes said a lot of things, but yes wasn’t one of them. They looked me over critically. I was suddenly hyperaware of the smell of the mouthwash I had gargled with earlier to mask the smell of the Scotch I had with breakfast. They said breakfast was th
e most important meal of the day and, as such, I had wanted to make sure it had been appropriately celebrated.

  As he looked at me, Glenn’s eyes protruded from his head a little, like a startled cartoon character’s. He was not a handsome man. He was squat, with short thick limbs, a big belly, and mottled skin. He looked like the love child of the Buddha and a bullfrog. The way he was dressed did his already unusual appearance no favors. His ill-fitting, rumpled, and stained shirt and tie were a dry cleaner’s nightmare. His shoulder holster containing his service pistol was the only thing on his body that fit correctly.

  Glenn was married to a lovely woman who went with Glenn the way a fine, expensive wine went with a bag of stale potato chips. Their long marriage was further proof that love was blind. Or maybe Mrs. Pearson thought that, if she kissed her frog-like husband long enough, he would turn into a prince. Disney movies had really done a number on women.

  Despite his odd appearance, Glenn was a darned good cop, with eyes and instincts that did not miss much. He’d probably wind up police chief one day if he learned to stop talking to his superiors exactly the way he thought of them.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Glenn said abruptly, still looking at me with those bulging eyes that missed little.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Your eyes are bloodshot, you look rough around the edges, and you smell like the foreman of a spearmint gum factory.”

  “I’m fine. I must have gone overboard with the mouthwash earlier. You never know when a member of the adoring public will want to lock lips with a real-life Hero.” I was uncomfortable. As far as I was aware, Glenn did not know I had started drinking. I wanted to keep it that way. The way I had conducted myself lately embarrassed me, and the fewer people who knew about it the better. The last thing I wanted to talk about was me. “Speaking of Heroes, I’ve been hired by Massive Force to find out who murdered his wife. Now that I’m on the case, you wanna save yourself time and energy and just let Ethan Lamb go now?”

  “No.” Glenn shook his head at me. “Unless one of your powers involves you going back in time and stopping your client from killing his wife. I should have known you weren’t here just to shoot the breeze. I only see you when you want something. You should tell your client to look in the mirror if he wants to find the murderer.”

  “You’re that confident?”

  “The murder weapon was found in your client’s car, and his wife’s blood was all over it, not to mention his fingerprints. Yeah, we’re confident.”

  “You got a time of death for Mrs. Lamb?”

  “It happened between nine and eleven p.m. on the twelfth as near as the medical examiner can tell. Though Mrs. Lamb was a housewife, the Lambs hired a housekeeper to come in once a week to help with the housework to take some of the load off an ever-expanding Mrs. Lamb. The front door was locked, so the housekeeper let herself into the Lambs’ house the morning of the thirteenth with the key she had been given. She discovered Mrs. Lamb stabbed to death and lying in the middle of the living room. She called 911. Once we showed up and looked at what happened, we naturally wanted to talk to Mr. Lamb. You know better than most people that when a wife gets killed, it’s often at the hands of the husband. Especially in cases such as this one where there’s no sign of forced entry.”

  “Uxoricide,” I interjected, both to show I had been listening and to demonstrate I’d been studying my word of the day toilet paper.

  Glenn looked at me in near disbelief. “I’m constantly amazed that a man who looks like a cross between a bouncer and a gorilla knows words like that.”

  “Today’s one of my smart days. Usually I just scratch myself and grunt.”

  “The fact Lamb was nowhere to be found when we discovered his wife’s body pointed to the idea he had something to do with his wife’s mutilation. We started looking for him, and found his car across town from his house. When we searched it, that’s when we found the knife covered with Mrs. Lamb’s blood in the trunk. Now we really wanted to talk to Lamb. He says he last saw his wife on the twelfth, right before he went out that night on patrol as Massive Force. Mrs. Lamb was as fit as a fiddle when he left her, he says. He also says he saw on the news the next day that Mrs. Lamb had been killed and that he spent the next several days flying around the city, looking for his wife’s murderer. As for us, we say he’s the guy who killed her and he didn’t turn himself in sooner because he’s as guilty as O.J. Simpson.”

  “You say Mr. Lamb’s prints were on the knife. Anybody else’s?”

  “Just Mrs. Lamb’s.”

  I shook my head. “Your evidence is by no means conclusive. All you’ve really got is the knife. Ethan tells me it’s from their kitchen, which is why his and his wife’s prints were all over it. Someone could have stabbed Mrs. Lamb with the knife, and then planted it in Ethan’s car to make him look like the perpetrator.”

  “My God, I’ll bet you’re right. I’m so glad you came down here to lead the way for us poor clueless police officers.” Glenn’s mouth twitched. A mouth twitch was the closest Glenn ever actually came to smiling. “I’ll go you one better. I’ll bet what happened was that Mrs. Lamb took the knife from the kitchen, cut herself up like she was a piece of veal, then walked miles across town to where her husband’s car was parked, stashed the bloody knife inside the trunk, walked back to the house—all without being seen by anyone and while her guts were spilling out of her like an overflowing plate of spaghetti—locked up after herself, and then lay down on the living room floor to die with a song in her heart and a lightness in her soul, happy in the knowledge she had pinned her stabbing on her no-good husband.”

  “What did I tell you before about sarcasm and homicide detectives? Somebody wearing gloves could have stabbed Mrs. Lamb with the kitchen knife, which would explain why only the Lambs’ prints were on it. Think about it: if Ethan really is guilty, why wouldn’t he get rid of the knife instead of leaving it in his own car? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “A lot of things don’t make sense. Kanye West doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t change the fact he exists, making more money than either of us will ever see. Maybe Lamb was keeping the knife as a trophy. Stranger things have happened. I know a guy who killed ten people, cut their ears off, dried them out, and wore them on a necklace under his shirt as a trophy for years before he was caught. Maybe Lamb stowed the knife in the car, intending to get rid of it later.” Glenn shrugged. “Or maybe he’s just stupid.”

  “Stupid people don’t get a Hero’s license.”

  Glenn’s mouth twitched again. “Are you the exception that proves the rule?”

  I ignored him. We Heroes took the high road. Besides, there was the risk Glenn would shoot me if I flipped him the bird. I said, “All right, forget the knife for a minute. Ethan’s attorney tells me he gave you all an alibi witness. A woman named Maureen Jansen. Why doesn’t that clear Ethan?”

  “Yeah, your boy was supposedly shtupping his girlfriend Maureen on the other side of town at the time his pregnant wife was being stabbed to death.” Ethan hadn’t said anything about a girlfriend the night he met me. I first learned of Maureen when I spoke to Mr. Foote.

  “Shtupping?” I repeated. “What finishing school did you pick that up in? You cops are so refined. So why doesn’t that clear Ethan?”

  “We don’t believe he was with his girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve little doubt Mr. Lamb has seen Miss Jansen’s vagina more than her gynecologist has. Mrs. Lamb’s family says Mr. Lamb is quite the ladies’ man, and Miss Jansen is apparently but the latest in a long line of extracurricular partners. According to Mrs. Lamb’s family, Mr. and Mr. Lamb fought about his affairs often, but most recently, a day or two before she was killed. His continuing affairs were why Mrs. Lamb contemplated leaving him despite the fact she was pregnant with his kid.

  “But regardless of what Lamb and his girlfriend say, I don’t think Lamb was with Miss Jansen the night his wife was killed. For one thing, his car wasn’t parked anywhere ne
ar Miss Jansen’s house.”

  “He could’ve flown there,” I interjected.

  Glenn waved me quiet with stubby fingers. “For another, I wouldn’t believe Miss Jansen if she told me sugar is sweet while I had a mouthful of it. I interviewed her myself. She’s as believable as a Telemundo soap opera. We think she’s lying to protect Lamb. Plus, we canvassed her neighborhood after Lamb told us about Miss Jansen. Nobody saw Lamb or Massive Force enter or leave the Jansen residence the night of Mrs. Lamb’s death, or saw that he was anywhere near it.”

  Glenn raised his hand, ticking off three of his thick fingers as he continued. “So, we’ve got the means, namely the bloody knife covered with Lamb’s prints found in his car. We’ve got the motive, namely the wife talking about leaving Lamb. Lamb was the breadwinner and Mrs. Lamb didn’t work outside the home. She had no education beyond high school and no marketable job skills. If she divorced him, she would get at least half of Lamb’s current assets and future income, not to mention child support when the kid was born. Lamb is sitting on a pile of money. People have killed to protect a lot less than what that guy’s got.”

  Glenn raised a third finger. “And, we’ve got opportunity. Lamb doesn’t have a credible alibi and could easily have stabbed his wife to death. I’m no prosecuting attorney, but that all adds up to a conviction according to my math.”

  It did according to my math too. I was increasingly less optimistic about Ethan’s innocence.

  Glenn hesitated. “Plus, there’s how Mrs. Lamb was killed.”

  “What do you mean, how she was killed? She was stabbed.”

  “It’s probably easier to show you. Come here.” He gestured for me to join him behind his desk. I got up, feeling my head swim a bit as I did so. I stood behind Glenn while he tapped at his computer keyboard with his sausage fingers.