The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) Read online

  The Brain Vault

  A Stephanie Chalice Thriller

  #3

  By

  Lawrence Kelter

  The

  Brain Vault

  Lawrence Kelter

  The Brain Vault Copyright © 2011 by Lawrence Kelter

  All rights reserved.

  Fourth Edition – March 2015

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, or persons living or dead, is coincidental.

  Interior book design by

  Bob Houston eBook Formatting

  For

  Morris, Doris, Salvatore, and Adelina

  One

  Newest of all moons, the tail of the waxing crescent was visible as I looked up at the cloud-riddled sky, a dagger’s silver blade against the vast, black heavens.

  It was a lovely night for crime.

  Now if you knew me, you’d know that a gal like Stephanie Chalice wouldn’t normally be caught dead taking a midnight stroll through Central Park (not without an Uzi under each arm anyway). But I’m not alone; I’m with Gus Lido. Gus and I, we’re both on the job, two of New York’s finest trying to carve a moment’s peace out of a day of sheer chaos. He’s in a tux and I’m in an evening gown—even so, we’re armed and dangerous, trust me.

  I was hoping for an altercation free evening, but such seemed destined not to be the case.

  “Hey, watch it,” Gus said, grabbing my hand and preventing me from putting my foot down where God and Jimmy Choo had not intended for it to go.

  “Wow. Look at the size of that.”

  Gus shook his head in amazement. “Got to be a Labrador.”

  Labrador, how about a Clydesdale?

  “The last time I saw a specimen like that was on an episode of Animal Planet—the crew was in the Serengeti, tracking a herd of elephants.”

  “Anything else you can tell me from your examination of the specimen? What did the beast have for dinner, Iams or Eukanuba?”

  Gus snorted.

  Hell of a way to start a story, isn’t it?

  Yeah, I think so too—In any case, my designer pumps had escaped a fate worse than death.

  Well, you may have guessed that Lido and I are a team and then some. We both work homicide out of Midtown North, fighting crime and our sexual urges twenty-four/seven. We seem to be a lot better at solving case crimes than keeping our hormones in check, but we’re discreet—at least I think we are. Gus and I have one of the highest case-closing percentages on the squad—we get the job done and manage to get a little something, something in on the side. Few people know that we’re together, and I intend to keep the list short. I love my job and my partner. Having your cake and eating it too can be a lot of work. No one ever said life was simple.

  Gus and I had just broken away from a retirement party at The Boathouse Cafe. Our boss, Chief of Detectives Sonellio had finally put in his papers after thirty-five years on the job. I really and truly love the old guy. He’s been part of my life since way back when. He was my dad’s friend when he was on the job and has been like a Dutch uncle to me ever since my dad’s passing.

  I wasn’t sure how well retirement would serve a man like him, a man that had spent the best years of his life putting New York City’s most heinous animals behind bars. I wondered just how much time an ex-cop could spend fly-fishing before he went absolutely bat shit. He was leaving for his lakeside cabin in Maine over the weekend. I guess we’ll just have to see how that goes.

  Central Park seemed dreamlike as we strolled along. It looked something like a monotone Van Gogh, with lamplights playing on shadows and tree tips bending to the wind. The stars were large and clear where the clouds gapped. The air was damp enough to enhance the fragrance of the blossoming flowers.

  “Hell of a night,” Lido said as we walked along.

  “Like something out of a dream.”

  Lido turned to me looking distressed. He always had an involuntary reaction to the D word. It was like a scene from a cartoon, and two anvils had just swung down from above him, colliding with either side of his head. Dream, that sinister D word, it was for Lido a metaphoric iceberg, an enigma that he could just see at the tip. The rest, that invisible ninety percent taunted him mercilessly. You see my life has at times been a tad bizarre. There’s just so much going on in my head when I sleep, weird and crazy stuff. My dreams are usually a preamble to adventure, to trouble, and case crime. I think Lido would prefer it if I became an insomniac, but as we all know, that was not about to happen anytime soon.

  “So what’d you think about the party?” Lido asked.

  “It was fun,” I said, but my eyes said differently, and Gus knew it instantly.

  “You look like you’re hiding something. What’s up?”

  I stopped and watched the hypnotic pattern of the tree tips as they continued to sway back and forth. It took a moment until I confessed. “Change can be very hard to accept.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “Sonellio, retired, growing old, and—”

  “Out of your life.” Lido put his arms around me. “He’s not gone, Stephanie, just retired.”

  “He has always been there for Ma and me. I always knew where he was, just a stone’s throw away at the precinct. In a few days he’ll be off fishing for bass of all things. It just seems completely wrong.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong. Who knows what we’ll want when we retire.”

  Gus was such a fabulous guy; every word out of his mouth resounded with commitment. Our relationship was just coming up on a year, and the marriage word had never reared its ugly head. I suppose that’s what made us work—we both knew we were there for each other. “I don’t know, maybe you’re right.” I shrugged.

  “Still.” Lido lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  I shook my head. Lido knew exactly why I was sad. Sonellio’s health had been on a steady decline over the last several months. There was that constant hacking cough that crackled through my brain like gunfire, and the unhealthy pallor of his skin, which had once been rich with the glow of his Sicilian heritage. Was he really going on vacation, or was it just an excuse so that he could slip away quietly to die in peace?

  “He’s such a private man. I want to—”

  “This is the way he wants it, Stephanie. It would be wrong for you to interfere.” Lido leaned in to kiss me. “I’m still here.”

  Our lips had just touched when a frightening, guttural moan filled the air. Adrenaline pumped the melancholy out of my head.

  “Christ, what the hell was that?”

  We turned and ran in the direction the noise had come from. I heard it again and tried to hone in on the location. Now I’ve got long legs, but I had trouble keeping up with Lido in my gown and pumps. The paths of Central Park were a maze in the darkness. We ran for moments, searching for activity, but the paths broke off in different directions, never taking us where we had hoped they would lead us. I could hear the telltale sound off in the distance. It was the sound of a human being in intense pain.

  “Do you know where we are?” Lido asked.

  I stopped and looked around, trying to get my bearings, somehow trying to imagine the park in daylight as I was familiar with it. I was
hoping to find something familiar about the landscape, something that would ring that proverbial bell. And then, looking up at the sky, it came to me. Off in the distance were the tall tree tips that had drawn my attention as they swayed back and forth with the wind. “Let me take you down.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Gus said.

  “Let me take you down.”

  “Are you sloshed?”

  “No.” I didn’t take the time to elaborate. I just turned and ran. He knew that I was on to something and followed.

  Two

  The evening sky was bright enough for me to make out the tips of the three bald cypress trees I knew stood at the northern tip of the main lawns that made up the Strawberry Fields Memorial. I can’t tell you how I knew that we were supposed to be there, but I did. Call it a premonition. “Let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” The verse to John Lennon’s song looped through my head as I picked up speed. For a moment, Lido had been left flatfooted, shaking his head in wonder, but he had now caught up and was pacing me, shoulder to shoulder.

  “Let me take you down?” Lido asked.

  “‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields. Don’t you get it?”

  “Stephanie, have you gone entirely insane?”

  “Don’t ask me what I’m doing, just follow me.”

  Gus knew better than to argue. In the time we had worked as a team, he had learned that I had a sixth sense about this sort of thing that was absolutely uncanny.

  Okay, there comes a time in every woman’s life when she has to make some really tough choices, and this was one of those times. The exquisite Jimmy Choos I was wearing had gone from being a fashion statement to a high-speed liability. I didn’t want to tumble head over heels like an accelerating albatross, so I kicked them off while in full stride so that I could bravely run barefooted where no evening gown clad detective had ever run before. Damn, I think I just stepped on a slug.

  We were now on the looped path I knew would take us directly to the mosaic at the center of the Strawberry Fields memorial. I’d walked it so many times before. My dad was a kid when the Beatles first arrived on the scene back in the sixties. My closet was still filled with his old vinyl albums: Meet the Beatles, Introducing the Beatles, The White Album—he had them all. The songs had become a permanent connection between the two of us; one that transcended time and bridged the gap between the physical and metaphysical world. I can still remember him telling me about the Fab Four. He had an Abbey Road tape in the car that he’d play endlessly. I was just a kid when John Lennon died, but I can still remember how the city was stricken by his murder. It was such an awful and senseless tragedy. It hit my dad really hard—he played his Beatle tapes over and over as if trying to hold onto a shred of the passed artist. Eventually we all moved on, but Lennon’s music would always flow from him through my dad to me, words and music we would keep forever.

  “Let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields. Nothing is real…”

  At the center of the Strawberry Fields mosaic, partially covering the word IMAGINE, was a man, barely covered by a tattered bed sheet, lying unconscious. Most of his body was visible. Even in the dark, I could see a strange mosaic pattern on his skin. As I got closer, I could see that he was covered with scars over most of his body. My mind jumped to a conclusion, perhaps unsubstantiated, but it looked like a sadistic montage, a pattern that memorialized the torture I suspected this poor soul must have endured. He had sustained a rather large gash on his ankle near the Achilles tendon where blood was still pooling. Even in the out of doors, the man reeked of cigarette smoke.

  “He’s still alive,” I shouted. I pressed my ear against his chest to confirm my initial diagnosis. I knew that he was alive because bleeding quickly stops after the heart arrests. His heartbeat was weak and slow—It was nonetheless present. “He’s still with us, but going fast—call for a bus.”

  Lido was on his cell phone instantly, requesting help.

  I tore the hem off my silk crepe gown and quickly tied a tourniquet around John Doe’s leg, desecrating forever the design genius of Donna Karan. My lifesaving triage technique seemed to do the trick, the bleeding stopped. With God’s help and a well-trained EMT driver, Doe would get to the hospital in time and stay alive. At the same time, tearing away the hem, had transformed my elegant Donna Karan gown into a micro dress, leaving me visible up to the—” The gown was ruined, but I knew a couple of call girls that could make good use of it still—I’m so thrifty.

  Lido placed his dinner jacked over Doe’s upper body to keep him warm.

  “How does he look?”

  “Too close to call. He’s very weak.”

  Lido’s eyes were traveling up and down my legs. He whispered in my ear. “Promise you’ll never throw this dress away.” Now, I had a modest collection of hooker skirts and Joan Crawford pumps in the closet that I trotted out when the occasion called for it, but from the reaction I was getting from Lido, I figured one more couldn’t hurt. Lido looked feverish. I could see the carotid artery bulge on his neck. We’d be riding with Doe to the hospital in a few minutes. I didn’t know where we’d find the opportunity, but while a surgical team was patching Doe, we would likely find ourselves entwined in one of the hospital’s on-call rooms—one could only hope.

  Time was running out for Doe. While waiting, I continued to scan the portion of his body that Lido’s jacket didn’t cover. There were scars and burn marks over almost every inch of exposed skin. Thank God you escaped. I could only imagine what this poor soul had been through. How long had this poor man been imprisoned?

  Off in the distance I could hear an ambulance’s electronic yelp drawing closer. I pressed my hand against Doe’s chest. “He’s still with us. Gus, I think you should meet the bus at the park entrance and lead them here. We don’t want to lose any time.”

  “Agreed. I’ll be right back.”

  I watched Gus as he disappeared into the darkness; his crisp white shirt reflecting moonlight—for a moment, it looked like a ghostly torso disappearing into the tree lined park.

  With Gus gone, the park felt eerily silent. I checked Doe again. His heart sounded weak, so I pushed aside Lido’s jacket and examined Doe for other wounds I may have missed, wounds that might prove fatal. I rocked him upward a bit to examine his back. As I did, I noticed a bright white object lying nearby under a shrub. I strained to see it more clearly. As I was doing so, I felt something embedded in Doe’s back. My senses were racing, sight and touch competing, to identify the two objects.

  Sight won out. The object lying at the base of the shrub was nothing other than a pure, white human skull. What in God’s name? I was still reeling from the first discovery when it dawned on me that the object embedded in Doe’s back was a Taser dart. A wire running from the object confirmed my suspicion. My heart rate spiked. I spun around quickly to survey my surroundings, and the hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention. I was not alone.

  And then it hit me. I felt an excruciating pain in the small of my back, as if an electric power line had hit me. I began to shake as the Taser blast racked my body. I tightened my fists to fight it but it was too strong. I had to place my palms against the ground to steady myself. As I did, I heard menacing, adenoid laughter nearby, and the sound of someone approaching from behind me. I was on my hands and knees fighting to stay conscious, trying to keep the muscular spasm from knocking me onto my back. All the time, I heard him drawing closer.

  The Taser was still frying my nervous system when I felt his hot breath on my neck dampening my skin with his evil. The sound of his mocking laughter grew louder—it was as if he were in my ears. As I turned to see his face, I heard the sound of others approaching. “Gus.” I cried out his name. Somehow I knew who it was. My stricken voice cried out for my other half, my partner and friend.

  “Stephanie?” I heard his voice boom back from somewhere in the park.

  Thank God. “Gus!”

  I heard my assailant g
asp. Panic set into his labored breathing. He turned and was about to run. I wanted to grab him, do anything to slow him down until Lido arrived.

  “Stephanie!” Lido’s voice sounded closer.

  “Gus,” my voice was now nothing more than a whisper.

  I tried to pull my hand off the ground, but my muscles were unresponsive. They felt rubbery and disconnected. I finally jerked my hand free, but I couldn’t keep my balance and fell over, smacking my head on the rock hard ceramic ground. My assailant was already yards away, slipping into the darkness. I wanted to know him. My eyes drilled through the darkness, but he was already too far away. My brain was struggling to fit the pieces together, but my thoughts just kept bouncing around my head and not making sense. Looking up at the night sky, I saw that dagger moon, hanging low enough to slice through me. It seemed to be falling out of the sky.

  “Stephanie!”

  Lido sounded just yards away. I couldn’t wait to see his face and know that I was safe. Somewhere, somehow, I must have known it already, and knew that I could drop my guard because the moon began to dim, and then everything went black.

  Three

  “No showboating, Stephanie—get a good strong grip and hold onto the wing strut with both hands.”

  “Wing strut? Showboating? What the hell is going on here?” And then the darkness opened up around me and I saw where I was. “Oh, Jesus!” I was thousands of feet up in the air, holding on for dear life, under the wing of a single engine plane with miles of absolutely nothing beneath me. I made the mistake of looking down. “Oh dear God.”

  “Huge mistake, Stephanie, focus straight ahead; don’t let your nerves get the better of you.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Think of something that will distract you—Scotsmen playing bagpipes for instance.”