New Blood Read online

  New Blood

  Shane Lusher

  Contents

  Join the Conversation

  Dedication

  Monday

  Chapter 1

  Tuesday

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Thursday

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Friday

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Saturday

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Sunday

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Tuesday

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Free Book Offer

  Call for Reviews

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Join the Conversation

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  Dedication

  For Jake. It was the best I could do, buddy.

  Monday

  One

  It went in with a pop.

  * * *

  It was quick, and it was out before Sweeney had time to react. Just a tensing, there, beneath the shoulders, and then he was gone, and as she slid it out from under the bump at the back of his shaved head, he collapsed backwards, on top of her, and she looked at his face.

  Some say that death brings a certain peace to a person’s expression, and though she knew from experience that this wasn’t always true, Sweeney in death was much easier to look at than he had been in life.

  Gone were the marks around his mouth and his eyes that might have given any indication of what he had been, what some people had made of him. It had been the making that had been important, and what came afterwards the most important, because Sweeney had made a choice, and he had chosen wrong.

  She’d been made, too, after all, and her choices had been different. She’d gotten away from all of that, for a time, until Sweeney had drawn her back into the yellow light, his tongue whispering false promises. And now Sweeney was dead. He was unmade, and there wouldn’t be any going back.

  Not for her, and certainly not for him.

  She sniffed, the odor of metal like burnt cat litter in the air, took in the lingering smell of the corn pollen. It was a smell she soon would never have to deal with again.

  She slid him down to the floor, on his back, and didn’t think about what that body had done to her, not even a wink of a thought, as she lowered her pants and squatted down over it.

  Before she left, she turned up the burners and watched the bubbles rise. She’d have about ten seconds to get out.

  That wasn’t going to be a problem.

  Tuesday

  Two

  When Tad Ely was shot in the street by a female methamphetamine junkie, he had an untold number of things counting against him, and maybe two or three in his favor.

  The gun was a thirty-eight, old cop issue, but stolen, and had once been used years before in a felony in Memphis. It had long been lost track of before it showed up in Pekin, Illinois, and Tad found himself on the shooting end of it.

  She got him first in the leg, and he might have kept from bleeding out if that had been it. When they found him, he had his belt wrapped around his thigh as a tourniquet. The EMTs said he would have survived.

  That is, if she hadn’t pointed the gun again and shot him in the mouth. The exit force blew the back out of his skull and most of his brain in a boat wake pattern halfway across Elizabeth Street.

  There had been no witnesses, which is not to say no one was around when it happened. It was the middle of the day in June; the sun high and hot in the sky, and there had been at least twenty people on the square. It was just that no one had actually been looking in his direction. When they did, the meth junkie was the only one near Tad.

  She was also the only one whose fingerprints were on the gun.

  I said Tad had two or three things going for him when he died.

  The first was that he was the youngest sheriff ever elected in Illinois history. It had given him his fair share of grief from the old guard, but it had also earned him a great deal of respect.

  In the five years he’d held the office, the solve rate on major crimes had gone from just under fifty to just over seventy-five percent. People liked him, and he had been sure to win by a landslide when he was up for re-election in the fall.

  That wasn’t the plus, though. The plus came from the fact that just being a law enforcement officer virtually guaranteed that his murderer would be found. Granted, it wasn’t that hard. The junkie was only two doors down from his corpse, in front of a laundromat, drinking water from an old detergent bottle.

  But his status in the community ensured a quick trial, and a speedy conviction, which, all things considered, were going along smoothly and in record time. The state’s attorney had been no special friend of Tad’s, but this didn’t mean he hadn’t respected him.

  He’d charged the woman, one Alisha Stamm, with murder one, had her locked up in the Tazewell County Justice Center with no chance of bail, and the judge had slated opening remarks for the day after the fourth of July.

  All this was fine and good with me. When you’re close to someone, you like to have them near. And there’s nothing like someone killing a relative to bring you close to them.

  Alisha Stamm wasn’t your typical meth user. Or rather, given meth’s tendency to warp anybody and everybody into something resembling a mall zombie, maybe she was dead-on for the type.

  She’d once been a housewife, gotten addicted to Oxycodone after a surgery, and when the prescriptions ran out, discovered that smoking cold medicine mixed with battery acid had a better kick than Mother’s Little Helper ever did.

  She was pushing fifty, blonde, and crazier than a mad hatter when I saw her the first time, at her arraignment.

  Hair unwashed for centuries, half her teeth missing, eyes bulging, and scratch marks up and down her arms. She didn’t seem to know where she was during the whole process, which was also fine with me.

  I’d kept my distance. I had enough respect for decorum, or at least I knew that if you messed around with a murder suspe
ct before she was convicted, things like a quick trial could go out the window rather quickly. Which was the last thing you wanted to happen. Especially when the deceased sheriff was your brother.

  I said that Tad had two or three things going for him when he died. The second was his daughter, Erin. Nine years old and already motherless – Tad’s wife having died of pancreatic cancer at the ripe old age of twenty-six – and I’d expected the state to give me custody.

  That had been the way Tad wanted it. He’d told me as much, long before, when we’d still spoken of such things.

  “Erin saved my life,” Tad had said. “Without her, I probably would have just ended it a long time ago.”

  We’d been up late, on his back porch, drinking scotch in the chill air of the spring and watching the rain come down. Tad had never been one to talk about suicide, but as T.S. Eliot once said, almost, scotch and the springtime can do that to a person.

  “If anything ever happens to me,” he said, “I want you to take care of her.”

  “I can’t take care of myself,” I said, trying to shrug off the moment. I’d gotten used to doing that by then, and it had served me well.

  “Anyway, I love Erin, but I’m not really the father type,” I said, sloshing the booze around in my glass.

  “You didn’t see it that way awhile back,” he said.

  Which was true, but Tad wasn’t supposed to talk about that. I’d made that very clear when I’d moved back down from Chicago and set up my consulting business in Tremont, somewhere a hundred miles south of Joliet.

  “I’m thirty-eight years old,” I said finally. “I’m too old.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m only six years younger than you,” Tad said. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

  He may have said something along the lines of her saving my life, as well.

  The conversation turned, after that, and so I never got to ask him why he thought it might be a good idea to deed his kid to an at-best functioning alcoholic, one who’d nearly gotten thrown in jail for assaulting a doctor. A guy who drank every day, starting at the latest by three in the afternoon and finishing up, most nights, nine or ten hours later.

  It was a hell of a burden to place on a nine-year-old kid.

  The state saw it that way, too. I’d beat the assault charge, settled the civil suit out of court to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, but it had still been right there, in front of them, a matter of permanent record.

  And although Tad had actually written a document saying something about “My brother, Dana Hartman, is reliable, morally sound, and financially capable of assuming the responsibility of raising my daughter, Erin Ely, in the event of my demise,” the judge had sided with Tad’s girlfriend Kelly and given her temporary custody.

  Which left me with probationary custody, shared with a woman who didn’t think I should have been Tad’s choice in the first place.

  I said two or three things. That’s because I’m counting myself as the third. Not because I’m any special kind of person. In fact, I can be downright mean. If my wife hadn’t left me after our son died, I probably would have left her, too.

  Toward the end, I wasn’t very faithful, and I certainly wasn’t there for her emotionally. It’s hard to be emotionally there when you’re spending your non-working hours trying to drink your feelings away. I’d become another cliché, a fact that was lost neither on me nor on my wife, who filed for divorce after observing an appropriate period of mourning.

  And good for her. She deserved better.

  No, the reason Tad thought, even if I myself wasn’t so sure, that I could do anything for him, was that I was reliable. And except when mourning a dead child, I suppose that’s right about me.

  Reliable. Like a dog. My ex-wife would’ve said that I was stubborn, pigheaded, just a drunk who couldn’t see the trees for the light at the end of the tunnel; a dreamer, squandering away his paycheck for bottles of Glenlivet.

  And yet, there was this: when you’ve buried your only child, there’s not much more life can do to you. After all, you’ve already got the worst day of your life behind you.

  So Tad did have something right. When something bothers me, I sink my teeth into it until I figure out a way to get rid of it.

  And that thing that bothered me right now was Alisha Stamm.

  Because now that her time in the county jail had made her clean, she was claiming that someone else had murdered my brother.

  Three

  The Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department was on Capitol Street, around the corner from the courthouse, which was just about the only original building in Pekin left standing. The courthouse itself was built sometime in the 1920’s. Everything else had been torn down and replaced by something new: the laundromat, a microbrewery, an old hardware store that was forever going out of business, and a Java’s.

  The sheriff’s department, which everybody still called the county jail, was a new concrete-and-steel fabrication, three stories high and just as deep, with lots of tall glass windows up the front. It let in a lot of light, and gave one the impression that the architect was going for more of a public library feeling than an institution of criminal justice.

  Tad had said that the inmates had it better inside than the police, considering they could actually see all of that sunlight. The main office was on the ground floor along with the holding cells, but the actual jail, with a view of the Illinois River, was up above. It seemed to run counterintuitive to what one would think a jail should be, but I knew enough people in the building trades to know that an architect’s work was rarely intuitive.

  I breathed in the smell of cut grass as I mounted the stairs and opened the glass door to the entryway, the cold breath of air conditioning sticking my shirt to my sides beneath my suit coat. On the inside, the glass was tinted, and when the receptionist looked up at me, she didn’t even have to squint against the sun.

  She was, in fact, a receptionist, and not a desk sergeant, and her name was Janine. No last name on the plate on her desk. Janine was a thin woman in her late fifties, dressed in a turquoise suit with a white blouse. She was the kind of woman who smiled often, and would have come off as completely harmless if it weren’t for a certain quality to her face that said you’d better not mess with her.

  I waited while she finished typing. She clicked her mouse with an air of finality and then turned to me.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I’m Dana Hartman,” I said. “I’m here to see Alisha Stamm.”

  She turned around to glance behind her at the confines of the sheriff’s department, and then back at me.

  “So, you’re Dana?” she said. Her smile vanished briefly. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Tad is dearly missed.”

  I nodded. When you lose a loved one, people always come up with the standard. But it’s the standard you want. The ones who don’t say anything at all are the ones that bother you the most. The death of my son, Jake, had taught me that much.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Is it possible to speak to Alisha Stamm?”

  “Well,” she said. “You could, but she’s not here.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I didn’t think she was in court today.”

  “Well, she wasn’t going to be, but they decided to change her plea,” she said.

  “So they’ve gone that far already,” I said softly.

  Janine snorted. “Doesn’t matter, hon.” She leaned back in her swivel chair and crossed her legs. “Everybody knows she did it. They’re just trying to buy some time.”

  I nodded. I wondered what kind of time they were going to buy. I knew that the state’s attorney was pushing everything through quickly, but Erin had been asking questions. Specifically, why it took so long for the woman who had killed her father to finally go to prison?

  “Thanks, Janine.”

  “Anytime, Dana.”

  I walked over to the front door and put my hand on the handle, but she called out to me.

  “I heard about the Chic
ago Shopper,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I said, turning around. “At least that guy’s going to prison.” My testimony had been over for months. In the small part I’d played, that had stretched on for a full day and a half.

  “Good job on that one,” she said.

  I gave her a smile. “Thanks. But all I did was plug in some numbers in the computer.”

  “Sounds to me like you did more than that,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll let you go over to the courthouse. But you know that you have to stay away from her, right?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It would be best if you just didn’t see her, not unless you organize something through her lawyer,” Janine said. She’d already turned back to her computer. “Glenn Holzel has been state’s attorney for fifteen years. He knows what he’s doing.”