A Saint and A Sinner Ch. 05

His head was pounding, his stomach a constant churning ache. He managed to open the door to his office and slink over to his chair, wincing at the sound it made when he pulled it back. He sank down into it, laying his head on his arms on the desk, praying that either God would take mercy on him or kill him. Killing him would be a mercy today and God didn't grant such mercies to people like him.

Nick reached into the middle drawer of his desk, his fingers going over the different pill bottles until he found the one he needed. He flipped the cap with one finger spilling out a couple of pills to land on the floor. He pulled one out and tossed it in his mouth, dry swallowing it. Then he put his head back on the desk and waited for either death or relief.

The door to his office swept open, slamming into the wall in a loud burst of plaster dust. He cringed away from the noise and felt the floor tilt and move, fighting the nausea that kept threatening to overwhelm him. A voice called his name and all he could do was hold up one finger for them to go away and let him die. He pulled the wastebasket over and put it between his legs, breathing as deeply as the pain would allow. If he threw up the pill, it wouldn't do him any good. If he took anything stronger, the injections that would send the pain spinning away, also spun him away. He would be no good to anyone.

Like he was good for anything now.

He felt a cool hand on his forehead, heard a sweet, husky voice call his name. He leaned into the hand, absorbing the comfort the coolness brought.

"I'm fine," he groaned out between gritted teeth.

Michelle looked down at the figure all but curled under the desk, the anger that had brought her fuming in here disappearing at one look at his white face. She crouched down next to him, concern etching her forehead. This wasn't a hangover. Something was wrong.

"Nick, you aren't fine. You shouldn't be here." She could see the white line of his lips pressed together, the beads of sweat along his forehead that dripped into the trash can. "Let me take you home."

"Wait," he ground out. "Give me a minute, I'll be fine." He could feel the pill starting to work, the pain receding, the ache in his stomach subsiding to a manageable level. He breathed a huge sigh of relief and moved his head a little, gauging the amount of pain movement would bring. He sat up, slowly and carefully, and let his head rest against the window behind his chair.

Michelle was still crouching down by his legs, looking at him as if he would pass out or throw up at any moment. She looked almost panicked, as if she really cared if something happened to him. It struck a chord that hit way to close to what little he thought was left of his heart.

"Hey, if I had known it would only take one of these stupid headaches to get you to call me Nick, I would have done it a while ago," he tried to grin but it came out as more of a grimace.

She spotted the pills that he had dropped and picked them up, opening the drawer a little farther and looking into a little private piece of the hero that not many people knew. She dropped the pills back into their bottle and looked at the prescription. Pills with names longer than her arm with the directions; take one every four hours or as needed. He had a stash of one use only air pressure syringes filled with another form of the same drug. Migraines. He had a couple more prescription bottles with more names that she couldn't even pronounce. The description was for prevention of migraines. The price of being Nick Saint, the price of having superhuman powers was having superhuman pain.

The pain was ebbing more and Nick felt the first flash of embarrassment. The migraine had caught him off guard, attacking quickly. He had wanted to stay at home for a couple of hours until his pills could start working, but when he had gone to get one of them, the bottle had been empty. It was in his pocket now; he would drop it off at the pharmacy when he felt better. His only other stash of pills was in his office at work. He had thought that he could make it in unseen, maybe sit in the dark for an hour and pray for death before anyone would know he was there. He should have known that Michelle would find him. The girl had a nose like a bloodhound and eyes like a hawk, only hers were much better looking.

"What had you coming in here like a SWAT team?" he asked, to take the focus off of himself and his weakness.

"Forget about it." She kept her voice pitched low and soothing, hoping it wouldn't cause him pain. She didn't know how he had made it in to work; the drive alone could have killed him. It had to have been a nightmare. He could have called her, that was what partners were for. At least that was what he had been telling her for the past couple of days that they had worked together.

"No," his voice was stronger and he risked opening his eyes a little bit wider. "Tell me, maybe it will take my mind off of this." Maybe he could talk her into putting her hands on his face again. It had felt so good. "Come on, be a pal and help make me feel better."

Michelle felt like slime. She had walked in here mad, pissed enough to tell him to go to hell and forget about working with her. Now her anger was almost gone, all that was left was disgust at herself and a tiny bud of annoyance that was disappearing too quickly to matter.

"You talked to Sam about me." She said it matter-of-factly, as if it made no difference now. Which it didn't, she realized in surprise.

"Just in passing."

It wasn't quite true, but close enough. He had seen Sam, had passed him. But he had also backed him into a wall and wanted to smash his fist in the guy's face at the lascivious grin that had erupted at Michelle's name. He had managed to restrain himself. But just barely.

"That's not what Sam said." She shook her head, allowing a little of the annoyance to build. "I can take care of myself, Detective Saint. I don't need anyone protecting me from over sexed partners." She stood up and backed away from him. Her eyes assessed the damage the headache had done to him.

He was recovering, slowly. He blinked back at her owlishly, as if he wasn't sure that what he was seeing wasn't a pain induced hallucination. He wasn't steady and the hand that he pushed up into his hair was shaking.

"How did you drive here?"

He answered her truthfully, if not a little ruefully. "I'm not quite sure. I think if the sun had come out from behind the clouds, you would probably be scraping me off of some tree right now."

"Stupid."

He tried to grin again and felt it came off a little better, not hurting quite as much. "Very true, but necessary. I'm out of my pills at home." He hated the weakness in his voice almost as much as he hated being dependent on anything, especially medication.

"Did you know you're bleeding?" She reached out and gently wiped away a small trail of blood with a tissue she had taken out of the pocket of her jacket. The blood was from a small cut on his lip. It looked like a bite mark.

"Hmmm, nope, didn't know that." He touched his lip with one finger, pulled it back to look at the small smear of blood. "I think I bit my lip when I started my car and the music came on." He'd been listening to a country music radio station last night when he pulled into his driveway. The news had come on and he had punished himself by listening to the commentator desecrate everyone connected to his case from the Mayor down. His name had been mentioned, along with the no comment he had given the station when they had called yesterday asking for some kind of update. Would the term "we still have nothing," be considered an update?

The lab reports were coming in on the second victim. Most were of no use, the same blah, blah, blah as the last set. They had managed to find a fiber caught under her fingernail. The fiber was of wool, high end and dyed a dark navy. So their subject wore high end wool suits. Which meant that they probably weren't looking for any of the hicks or rednecks that hung out at the pool hall down town.

He had washed the bodies before dropping them. The labs had found traces of a perfumed soap, Victoria's Secret's Love Spell. There were Victoria's Secret stores in most of the malls within two hours of Lapeer. Not to mention the booming internet trade as well as their mail order purchasers. But he sent out the guys anyways, telling them to ask about unusual male customers, anyone who seemed a little weird. Forty percent of the guys that went into lingerie stores were a little weird. Nut cases loved malls.

"Are you sure you don't want me to take you home?" Her voice broke him out of his bleak thoughts.

"Your home?" The grin was wolfish even though a trifle unsteady.

"Men," she sighed in mock disgust. "Two minutes ago you were on death's door and now you're a pig. And you went after Sam for doing the same thing you're doing." She shook her head. "Maybe I should call you a hypocrite, Nicholas Saint."

"Hey, whoa. Wait a minute." He moved cautiously at first and then more surely as the pain retreated for the moment, there, ready to swallow him whole but held back by strength of will and drugs. "You just said that you didn't need help defending yourself from your oversexed partner. I was just offering to help you practice."

That little boy grin knocked her sideways and she retreated for a moment to regroup her barriers. He was too devastating to her defenses, too tempting to be easily resisted. And he probably had left a long list of broken hearts to prove it. She picked up the small stack of pink message slips someone had put in his in box on top of a mountain of file folders, looking through them idly, until one caught her attention. She pulled it out of the stack to look at more carefully.

"Isn't Alisha Redmond the CSI that is assigned to the second victim?" She stuck the note under Nick's nose.

He tried to read it, going cross eyed because she had it way to close. Grabbing it he read the message. Call ASAP. Maybe she had something. He picked up his phone and started hitting buttons. He tried the lab in Flint and was told that she wasn't due in today. So he ran through his rolodex and got her cell number. She answered on the fourth ring.

"Yeah?"

The woman had such a way with words.

"Hey Lisha, it's Nick. You got something for me?" There was nothing he could do about the impatient tone of his voice, it still hurt to think.

"Nice to hear from you, too, Nicky," she said sarcastically. "I've been calling you since last night. You ever hear of leaving your cell phone on?"

Just what he didn't need today. And then he had a guilty twinge at the thought of the cell phone that hadn't gotten put on its charger last night and was sitting on his kitchen counter, forgotten this morning.

"Sorry, Lisha. Dead battery."

"Likely excuse, darling."

He could feel anger starting to rise, accelerating his pulse rate, accelerating the pounding of his head as well. He looked at Michelle, wanting to roll his eyes but knowing just the movement alone could put him on the floor.

"So?" he tried again.

"I sent over a courier this morning. We got an ID on the second vic through a hit from the hotline. DNA matched. You should have the file on your desk." He could almost hear the voila said in her voice, the French accent coming across like some cartoon skunk. He quickly ended the call.

"Thanks Lisha, good work."

Then he pawed through the papers on his desk, finally finding the couriered envelope on the floor, having fallen there when he had come stumbling in. He opened it quickly and read through the information twice before handing it to Michelle.

She plunked herself down into one of the chairs across from him and read the report. Sheri Lynn Meridian; 20 years old; originally from Toledo, Ohio; current address Imlay City, MI; currently residing in a refrigerated drawer down in the morgue. There was a driver's license picture included. It looked very close to the computer generated picture they had of her. Why did it take so long for someone to come forward?

Nick was reading her mind. "It's a shame when the only one who will come forward to identify a body is their boss. And it even takes them a couple of weeks to do it." The thought glumly occurred to him that the same thing could happen if he were to disappear. He had no one in his life that would care if he died. No parents or siblings. His ex-wife would probably dance on his grave in glee after the hell that their marriage had been. Now that was a depressing thought.

He roused himself and gave her the cockiest grin he could muster. "Come on partner, let's get with it. We got people to see and a killer to catch."

They left the office and drove the twenty or so miles to the girl's apartment, badgering the manager to let them in. The place was a mess, clothes tossed everywhere, make-up in the sink. Her mail had been shoved into the small box in the lobby and finally the mailman had left her a nasty note to pick up the rest at the post office. They managed to get the super to open that up and took the contents too.

They gloved up, careful about what they moved. The place had either been ransacked or Sheri was a slob. He knew he should call in the crime lab guys, he knew Lisha should have done it herself. But he wanted some time to get to know this girl, to see what she was like, who she was besides a rotting corpse that had been dumped like so much garbage. For once, he thanked Lisha for being so self absorbed and not wanting to give up her morning off.

He gave the job of going through the mail to Michelle, making a mental note to go get the rest at the post office when they left here.

"Just go through, bag it all up. Look for anything that might seem different, make sure you grab a phone bill, credit card statements and the like. We'll go over it better at the office." She dug into the stack, carefully examining post marks and returned addresses, pulling out different envelopes to go over more carefully later.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, looking up from what looked to be a card of some kind.

"Snoop," was all he said.

He walked into the bathroom first. Women's bathrooms told a lot about themselves he had found out due to experience. It was small, barely as big as his shower at home. But Sheri had turned it into something pretty, painting it a light yellow and adding touches of sunflowers to the walls and the shower curtain. She had painted the cabinet under the sink white with a yellow door pull. The medicine cabinet had a cracked mirror and old lighting, but she had painted the trim white and refurbished the lighting with new shades. Yellow towels were scattered on the floor, half unfolded as if someone had just pulled over the stack. There was a yellow smiley face bathmat on the floor, a touch of humor that saddened him.

He opened the medicine cabinet. A toothbrush, half used tube of cheap toothpaste, a small box of band-aids and a half full bottle of extra strength Midol sat on one of the shelves, and that was it. In the sink was make-up, a cosmetic bag, carelessly tossed over the mess. One of the bottles was broken and had leaked over the rest of the containers, leaving a sticky mess. He didn't touch it, hoping that maybe the lab might be able to pull finger prints from the mess.

He opened the drawer under the sink, toilet cleaner, a bowl brush. Three rolls out of a four roll package of toilet paper. A mark where the sink had leaked at one time. He closed the cabinet door. He took a last look at the smiley face, tacky yellow and ragged staring up at him with its bright black smile and left the room.

The small bedroom wasn't much better. Clothing had been torn out of the closet, cheap shoes flung everywhere. One rested sideways on top of a cheap secondhand dresser. The bedding had been torn off the bed and left in a heap leaving the stained mattress bare. Maybe they would be able to pick up some useable DNA off of there.

He looked through the drawers; cheap jewelry had been dumped out of a case and lay mixed in with socks and nylon panties. Nothing more expensive then what could be picked up at any discount store. He saw a necklace that could be a match to the earring the victim had been wearing when she was found. The necklace was tarnished and dirty from wear and had probably turned the girl's neck green not long after buying it.

He searched the other drawers, not finding anything usable, no photo albums or pictures in frames. A small stack of old personal mail went into a plastic bag, as well as an address book and what looked to be either a day planner or a diary. He picked them up and dropped them on the kitchen counter while he checked out her cupboards.

The dishes were thrown on the floor, flour torn open and sprayed over the sink and counter. Her refrigerator door was standing open, rotting food stinking to high heaven. Pots and pans had been scattered over the entire area. He checked every cupboard and drawer, not finding anything interesting. He was closing the last drawer when a hand touched his shoulder, scaring him enough to make him turn quickly and reach for his gun.

Michelle jumped back, sheepishly smoothing her jacket as he glared at her.

"I called your name, you didn't answer me," she offered by way of an apology.

He glared at her for a second and then gave it up. No way he could stay mad at someone who had wanted to take care of him when he was sick.

"Did you find something, hotshot?" he asked, reaching out to push a strand of hair from her forehead. He realized what he had done and felt the heat on his cheeks as his face turned red. Touching her was addicting, and he felt like a junkie in need of a fix. He turned and picked up his evidence bags, giving himself a chance to recover, not noticing the look of confusion that flashed across her face to be ruthlessly pushed aside for professionalism.

"There were a couple of cards with no return address, postmarked from Toledo and this." She handed him a plastic bag with a single letter in it. He looked at the envelope and felt his breath catch, surprised then angry. Their killer was playing games.

"This was on the bottom of the stack," she peered over his shoulder.

The envelope was business size, mailed from Lapeer, and addressed to him in care of Sheri Meridian at this address.