CRIMINAL INTENTIONS: Season One Episode One: THE CARDIGANS Read online

  CRIMINAL INTENTIONS

  SEASON ONE, EPISODE ONE

  “THE CARDIGANS”

  COLE MCCADE

  Copyright © 2018 by Cole McCade.

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher / author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

  Cole McCade

  [email protected]

  Cover Artist: Cole McCade

  Cover Design Template: Les Solot

  www.fiverr.com/germancreative

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Audi, Camaro, Jell-O, University of Maryland, Chase Bank, Dumpster, Rohypnol, Brillo, Ziploc, Maryland Terrapins, Mountain Dew, BMW, Hummer, Martha Stewart, GQ, Men’s Heath, Dell, Instagram, Facebook, Johnny Walker Blue, iPhone

  [TABLE OF CONTENTS]

  [CONTENT WARNING]

  [READING NOTE]

  [0: ANATOMY OF A CRIME SCENE]

  [1: A NAMELESS MAN]

  [2: A STREET CORNER IN MONOCHROME]

  [3: A BRIDGE IN MADAGASCAR]

  [4: UNDER NEON LIGHTS]

  [5: EMPTY ROOM]

  [6: FOR THE TEAM]

  [7: BY THE BOOK]

  [8: SEE THIS THROUGH]

  [9: PROMISES AND POTIONS]

  [10: SEEN SO MUCH YOU COULD GET THE BLUES]

  [11: A STUDY IN BLUE]

  [12: THE BOY WHO CRIED]

  [13: ROARING TIDES]

  [14: AND IT GOES TICK TOCK]

  [15: LONG DAY AT THE CORRAL]

  [16: BREAK AND SHOUT]

  [17: CUT YOUR LITTLE HEART OUT]

  [18: AS WE SAY OUR LONG GOODBYES]

  [19: IT’S NOT THE ENDING]

  [DISCOVER YOUR CRIMINAL SIDE]

  [AFTERWORD]

  [GET VIP ACCESS]

  [FOR REVIEWERS]

  [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

  [ABOUT THE AUTHOR]

  [FIND MORE CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE & EROTICA AS COLE MCCADE]

  [DISCOVER SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY & HORROR AS XEN]

  [CONTENT WARNING]

  CONSIDERING THAT CRIMINAL INTENTIONS IS serialized in the form of episodic novels akin to a television series, I think it’s safe to rate this using U.S. FCC television standards and mark it TV-MA. Criminal Intentions follows multiple homicide investigations and, at times, can graphically depict the act or aftermath of attempted or successful murder.

  While it’s a given that a series about homicide investigations will describe actual homicides, it may be wise to review content warnings regarding the specifics of cases depicted in each episode.

  Content warnings for Season 1, Episode 1, “The Cardigans,” include:

  Death by strangulation.

  Dismemberment.

  Grave desecration.

  Desecration of dead bodies.

  Blood, gore, and graphic depiction of post-mortem decay.

  Deaths of queer characters.

  Threats against other queer characters.

  Discussion of untreated mental illness.

  Obsessive thoughts and fixations.

  Use of the slur “fag hag.”

  Alcohol consumption.

  Use of firearms.

  Content warnings for the afterword include:

  Violent child abuse.

  Gaslighting.

  Discussion of cults.

  Please read at your discretion, and make whatever decisions are best for you regarding content that may or may not be safe for you.

  Take care of yourselves, loves.

  –C

  [READING NOTE]

  THE CHARACTER SADE MARCUS USES the pronouns they/them/their as their preferred gender-neutral pronouns for a genderqueer and two-spirit person from the Lumbee nation.

  [0: ANATOMY OF A CRIME SCENE]

  DARIAN PARK DOESN’T YET KNOW he’s dead.

  He’s high on the taste of sugar-candy lips, drunk on the thrill of body to body. His blood runs the color of flickering lights, glitter-hot in his veins, and when the music pounds through him he’s a heartbeat in motion, twisting through the tangle of writhing flesh stretched from wall to wall in the packed club. Hands try to grasp him, draw him close, possess him, but he flirts and slides just out of reach.

  He isn’t for these men. He isn’t for anyone.

  Darian is wild, and after the shittiest breakup of his life he’s not ready to let another man tie him down.

  He’s drugged on the power of his own body by the time the hot sweet burn of three strawberry sangria shots, downed all in a row, evaporates off his tongue and fizzles in his veins. He’s sparks lit to gasoline, ready to make bad decisions—and though he tells himself to walk away before one of those bad decisions has a voice and a name and the touch of rough-knuckled hands over Darian’s skin, he already knows the empty ache in the pit of his stomach won’t let him leave all by himself.

  He’s fireworks shooting into the sky, and he doesn’t want to burst alone.

  One cigarette, he thinks. One cigarette to clear his head; then he’ll decide. Eenie-meenie-mini-mo, this little piggy, that little piggy, one, two, I choose you. Someone’s waiting to go home with him tonight, but first he needs to shake his buzz.

  He steps out the side exit near the bar, escaping from the groin-deep pulse of bass into the quieter sounds of stop-and-start traffic. The alley smells like rain on pavement and the shades of smokers past, their haunts in the butts piled against the club’s brick wall. He lights up, takes that deep drag of fire flowing fierce and warm down into his throat, and contemplates the memory of a man with close-cropped hair and deep hazel eyes who, as Darian flirted just out of his reach, had briefly let out a sweet and thrilling growl that licked its tongue down Darian’s back to knot in the hollow of his spine.

  Him, Darian decides, and taps the ash from his cigarette. Embers flicker, fall, die before they strike the pavement.

  And a stinging band of pain snaps around his neck, cutting a line of scraping acid into his flesh.

  He doesn’t feel the cigarette falling from his fingers. The cigarette is already a moment past, gone, forgotten. All other moments have fled—everything before, everything after.

  There is only now, the struggle to breathe, the ripping tumble of his heart, the confusion of his pulse. The way the street lights blur into watercolor streaks, melting across his vision. The sensation of something cold and slick beneath his grasping fingers, pressed too tight against his neck to pry free. It’s squeezing, crushing, and every breath is a knot.

  He’s strangely aware that the choking cord wrapped around his neck grows warmer with every passing second, absorbing the heat of his body, stealing it away as if stealing his life.

  He can smell someone, the musk of their body rushing in on each inhalation.

  Everything is slow, so slow.

  His thoughts.

  His pulse.

  His heart, fading away until it’s as muted as the club’s ongoing bass thrombosis filtered through insulating brick walls.

  He is brick, heavy.

  He wants to struggle, but can’t. His limbs are wood, his feet anchored by their own weight.

  It’s quick, so quick.

  He’s dying, just like that. He knows the taste of his own fear, and it’s yellow and vaguely sour and curdles the last remnants of strawberries left on his tongue.

  And then he’s gone.

  His cigarette, forgotten, lies in a puddle, its cherry glow gone dark, its paper soaking up the last of the Baltimore evening rain.

  [1: A NAMELESS MAN]

  MALCOLM KHALAJI LICKED THE TASTE of sweat from taut, pale skin, gathering the salt of maleness on his tongue, languishing in that particular scent, flavor, ineffable something that came at just that perfect moment of satiation when the body beneath him went limp—and there was only the mingled rush of shared, gasping breaths and the heat of flesh slowly relaxing around the ache of his cock.

  The lean, pretty young man beneath him laughed huskily, quiet vibratos shaking them both. His death-grip on Malcolm’s shoulders peeled away, relieving crescent moons of stinging pain one at a time. The man tossed his head back against Malcolm’s pillows, nestled against a damp tangle of hair. His smile was sly, his lips swollen and pink and kiss-bitten.

  “Do you want to know my name now?” he asked, and Malcolm chuckled, sinking down against him, brushing his lips to the pointed peak of his chin.

  “I might be vaguely interested.” But he groaned as his phone rang on the nightstand, its trill demanding and sharp. “Though not right now.”

  “Who’s calling you at three AM?”

  “Work,” Malcolm answered, then gripped the man’s hips and separated their bodies with a hiss for sensitized flesh and the drag of friction. He
fell against the headboard, caught up his phone, and swiped the call. “Khalaji.”

  “Got a body,” Captain Zarate y Salazar clipped off, exhaustion ragging the edges of her voice like ripped paper. “Central District. Six hundred block of West Lexington.”

  Malcolm closed his eyes, rubbing his temples. “Now?”

  “It’s not another last call loss. I need you on scene.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He let the call drop and rolled out of bed, reaching for his pants. The nameless man sprawled against the brushed wrought bronzework of Malcolm’s headboard, a sylph with a fringe of fanning lashes so light they shone nearly white, shadowing eyes a pale and laughing shade of green. Those eyes laughed at Malcolm even now, as they tracked him through dragging on his slacks and shrugging into a button-down.

  “What kind of job calls you out at this time of night?”

  “Homicide.” Malcolm pulled his shoulder holster from its place of honor hanging from the bed post, and slid his arm into the strap. “Lock the door when you leave.”

  He caught up his coat and slung it on, striding for the door. The nameless man’s voice drifted after him, lilting, mocking.

  “You trust me alone in your flat?”

  “What are you going to do?” Malcolm tossed over his shoulder. “Steal from a cop?”

  The nameless man’s laughter trailed him into the night, as Malcolm let his apartment door close and vaulted the stairs two at a time to the streets that waited, every night, to deliver another cold corpse in a body bag.

  Another cold corpse, and a case that might never be solved if he didn’t find a break within the first forty-eight.

  He carried too many of those cases inside him. Too many dead ends, too many losses.

  Not that a win could bring the dead back to life.

  Malcolm didn’t have that power, and he’d given up on saving lives long ago.

  By the time he got to them now, it was already too late.

  [2: A STREET CORNER IN MONOCHROME]

  BY THE TIME MALCOLM ARRIVED on-scene, Captain Zarate was already stepping out of her unmarked car, the sleek black Audi throwing back the flashing red and blue of the uniformed units’ bars. Malcolm slung his Camaro into a curbside slot with his bumper almost kissing her tail lights, took a moment to sweep his hair back into a messy bun and snap an elastic over it, then slid out of the car.

  The night smelled like stale Jell-O shots, gasoline, and blood steaming in the lingering smolder of an autumn evening—where September chill had settled in the night air, but the pavement was unwilling to let go of the boiling heat it had absorbed throughout the day. Every crime scene had its own scent, but at the heart of each was the scent of blood. Even the ones who died without a single wound, stiff in their beds of cardiac arrest or necks purpled with the sawing marks of rope and fingers or bloated with the strange sick colors of poison…

  Somehow they still smelled of that cloyingly sharp, strangely electric scent of blood.

  Maybe what Malcolm called the scent of blood was really just the scent of death.

  Zarate lingered by her car, her hands on her spare, angular hips, lines of exhaustion creasing beneath dark brown eyes. Even at this time of night she was sharp in flared slacks, a severely buttoned shirt, and a stylish suit coat; Malcolm had never seen her not perfectly on point and ready to present the picture of confident authority, even at three in the morning.

  She took a few restless steps, running her fingers through her short crop of black hair. He quickened his stride and fell in at her side. Together they approached the mouth of the alley to one side of Baltimore’s more prominent gay clubs. A significant cross-section of Baltimore’s queer community milled in upset tangles near the club entrance, including a number of U of M College Queers™—all corralled by harried-looking officers whose raised voices tried to separate patrons from staff.

  Several uniforms clustered at the very threshold of the alleyway like vampires afraid to cross onto hallowed ground, leaning in. One turned away, covering his mouth as he made heaving sounds into his palm. Malcolm arched a brow, then glanced at Zarate.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be here,” he said.

  “This is a bit of a special case.”

  “Why?”

  Her wide, starkly bony shoulders jerked in something that wasn’t quite a shrug. She said nothing until they reached the cluster of officers, who parted before them, nearly skittering out of the way.

  A body lay in the alleyway, sprawled half on the street, half slumped against the wall: a fairly well-built young man, his neck striated with angry red lines, brown hair flopping across his waxy face in a disarrayed mess. Not someone easily overpowered, Malcolm thought, already cataloguing the crime scene. He had that club queer body, hard-honed. Powerful sinew bunched in corded forearms, straining against a tight t-shirt in pale blue spattered with collateral spray in dark spots dried, by now, to near black. And he likely would have been tall.

  If he still had his legs.

  Rather than ragged, sawed-off stumps protruding from the shreds of his blood-soaked jeans.

  Malcolm tilted his head. That was new. Sickening. Interesting. More interesting than the fact that someone must have caught him off-guard, to overpower him.

  Even more interesting, though, was the man crouched over the body, hovering like a crow with the black wings of his long coat folded around him. He was tall and lean and square of shoulder, with a shag of black hair falling across a face made entirely of angles positioned in sharp opposition until he was a razor of pale golden skin. His full, sullen mouth stood out against his skin like a bruise, and that mouth tightened as he carefully lifted a red-drenched shred of denim in latex-gloved fingers, examining it closely through narrowed, slyly angled eyes.

  “Him,” Zarate said.

  Malcolm frowned. “He’s not forensics. Fed?”

  “No.” Zarate heaved a heavy sigh. “Transfer from LAPD. Just processed his papers yesterday.”

  Suspicion prickled on the back of Malcolm’s neck. “What are you not telling me?”

  “You’re working with him on this case.”

  “No.”

  It came out before he could stop it, quick enough to more than earn the flat, expectant look Zarate fixed on him. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Why.”

  “He wanted this case,” she answered. “Said it’s personal.”

  “Personal how?”

  Again that angular jerk of her shoulders. That was Zarate, all sticks bound together with steel bolts and razor wire, her movements full of kinetic tension and bristling with potential energy barely caged in the thin shell of brown skin.

  “Gay kid gets murdered, gay cop takes interest,” she said tersely.

  Malcolm let his gaze drift back to the dark-haired man, then to the empty face of the victim. Malcolm had been young like that once—young and drunk on his own strength and raw vitality, chasing sex and some facsimile of love in dark smoky rooms, kisses that bristled with the raw burn of stubble and the taste of deep heady bourbon, clasping hands and sighs that came out like a secret.

  He could see himself in the corpse’s blank eyes, and it made his stomach sink.

  “Yeah. I get that,” he murmured. “I do.” He sighed. “So it’s a short-term thing for this case.”

  Zarate’s mouth did an odd, twisty thing. She avoided his eyes. “…mnh.”

  “Anjulie.”

  “We’ll talk. Focus on the case. Fix it.” She pinned him with a hard look. “Before any more dead gay kids show up.”

  He ground his teeth. But an order was an order, and Zarate had enough on her shoulders. She didn’t need him throwing a tantrum about working with a partner, even if he had his doubts already. The new guy looked so young, so stiff. And like he was a stickler for procedure.