Blood Men: A Thriller

“Look, Edward, the car is going to show up all sorts of prints. The dead man wasn’t wearing gloves, so the shooter probably wasn’t either. Their plan would have been to wipe the car down or burn it. We’ll find him, and that will lead to the others. All of them. What’s the verdict?” he asks, turning toward the doctor.

“Nothing major. It’s a deep laceration and he’s lost some blood,” the doctor says. “We’ll bandage it up and keep him on a drip for a few more hours—but no reason we can’t release him tonight. However, he’ll have to stay off his feet for a couple of days.”

“Come on, Edward,” Schroder says as the doctor leaves them, “you’re in some deep shit here. You absolutely have to tell me what happened last night with Greensly.”

“You mean Kingsly,” Edward finishes, and the look of horror at his mistake appears immediately.

Schroder slowly shakes his head back and forth a couple of times. In some weird way he feels betrayed. He really wanted to believe Hunter was innocent.

“Kingsly,” Schroder says, and he hangs on the word for a few seconds. “That’s right, Edward. Not Greensly, but Kingsly. I never told you his name and the media don’t know it yet. There’s only one way you could have known that name, Edward, and that’s if your father gave it to you.”

“He gave me the name, but I never went there.”

Schroder knows he did. He knows he went there and maybe he didn’t intend to kill him, or maybe he did—either way the result was the same, and no matter how you look at it it’s completely unfair. Right now Edward Hunter should be celebrating Christmas Eve with his wife and daughter. Easiest thing to do now is to get Hunter to confess, then take him into custody.

“Look, Edward,” he says, keeping his voice low, “here’s the thing—the last two years have been hell. Too many goddamn psychopaths running around. Two long years, and I’m tired, real tired of this shit. I look at this city and I want to believe it’s a good city, and it is, it really is, there’s still a lot of good here, Edward, a lot worth defending. So many people, they think this city has turned to shit, but it hasn’t. It’s my city, I love this city—but, like I keep telling you, it’s on a precipice. Thing is, it doesn’t have to fall. We can save this city, it can be returned to the way it was. Looking back, there are things I wish I’d done differently. Things that could have—expedited investigations. Things that could have saved lives. If I could do it all over, there are rules I would’ve broken. Sometimes the ends can justify the means, you know? Sometimes you have to do bad things for the greater good. Bad things to save the city.

“Killing Kingsly, that was a bad thing, but you helped defend the city by doing it. What you have to do is say he attacked you and you defended yourself. A jury isn’t going to convict you on that, not when they know this son of a bitch helped kill your wife. Some scriptwriter will come along and ask to make a movie about it. And me—if it’d been my family that was hurt, I’d have done the same thing. You can’t keep denying you were there, Edward, the blood will prove it. And these people after you, they’ll keep coming. Let me take you into custody. Let me help you.”

Edward turns his gaze from Schroder to the ceiling and stares at it for a long moment.

“Bring me my daughter first. I want to see her,” Edward answers, “then we’ll talk.”

The curtain opens up and a nurse pushes forward a cart full of bandages and gauze pads. She smiles at Edward. “Looks nasty,” she says, “but we’ll get you up and about in no time. This won’t take long,” she adds.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Schroder says.

“Bring me Sam.”

“I will. I promise,” he answers, hoping it isn’t already too late.





chapter thirty-five


It’s another messy crime scene, the kind of scene where the killers had no real idea what they were doing. The house most of the action took place in belongs to a family with a couple of kids, who were lucky enough to be at the beach instead of at home. Schroder knows it easily could have been a whole lot different—knows the medical examiner could just as easily have been sending more than one station wagon. There’s broken glass out the front and broken glass around the back and a busted-up door inside and blood in various places on the driveway and the sidewalk. There are holes in fences and in the side of a parked car from the shots fired.

The street has been closed off, limiting the view to only the neighbors. Even the reporters are being held back, their cameras in range but not much for them to see. The victim has been covered up, and the shape of the body shielded by patrol cars. It makes for a nice backdrop for the cameras, but nothing more. The car the two men stole and that Hunter escaped in has already been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and is on its way to the police station to be examined.

“So the shooter killed his partner,” Schroder says, and Sheldon, the medical examiner, nods slowly, as if scared any quick movement will tear a muscle.

“One shot in the face,” he says. “One shot in each hand.”

“Confirms what witnesses said.”