Free Hanging Curve by Dani Amore Page A

Unfortunately for Detroit, the poor sections constituted most of the city. The victims were all similar in that they were drunks, drug users, homeless, or all three.
    My brother was a drunk and a drug addict, but I had bought him an apartment years back so he was never homeless.
    Not that it mattered.
    The cops had done their work, and eventually with some tire tracks, a key eyewitness and an informant, they had followed the trail to a guy named Wayne DeVoss. An artist with a warehouse studio overrun with rats, crack pipes, some unusual paintings and a suitcase with nearly fifty grand in cash.
    At first, the suitcase got all the attention, but eventually, it lost favor to the canvases. Which soon revealed the heavy impasto and thick textures weren’t oil or acrylic, but blood and brain tissue.
    Maybe inspired by the urban legend of snuff films, Wayne DeVoss had been an artistic pioneer, opening up a whole new field of modern art.
    Death paintings he called them.
    •
    The funny thing about being labeled as an athlete who thought too much was that even back then, it didn’t offend me. Because I knew they were right. My brother could play deep shortstop, backhand a high bouncer, whirl and throw with a fully unconscious grace a “frozen rope” to first base. I was the opposite. I would charge a ball, sacrifice my body to knock it down and then throw it with a clenched fist and gritted teeth, holding onto the ball too long so that it scorched dirt at the first basemen’s feet.
    Thinking too much.
    Not a good trait for an athlete.
    So I turned to computers. While Joe was out every night, drinking, getting high, getting laid, I focused on the family computer. I studied it. Took it apart and put it back together again. I studied software, learned code and more importantly, what good code could do. Within six months I had hacked into our high school’s computer system. Another six months and I was browsing private files at the University of Michigan, General Motors and the Detroit Mayor’s office.
    But I never told anyone.
    Even back then, privacy was all I really wanted.
    Privacy.
    And time to think.
    •
    I didn’t attend any court appearances featuring Wayne DeVoss. The man meant nothing to me. Instead, I booked a room at a nondescript hotel in a suburb of Detroit and fell into a routine. Early in the morning, I would study deals, contracts and project files for my company. I had also added a bit of a venture capitalist arm to my original software business and the profits from those half-dozen deals had made me a very wealthy man.
    In a way, my success had eerily counterweighted Joe’s fall from grace.
    His rookie year for the Tigers would be his best. The big contract that followed at the end of that year opened up the gates to the Party Palace and kept them open until long after Joe, his booze, his drugs and his money were thoroughly exhausted.
    It happened quickly. After that first season, the steady diet of booze and drugs began to eat away at his reflexes. The errors occurred with greater regularity. His batting average, always high because of his instinctive hitting style, began to drop. At first, a few digits every month. And then double digits. During his sophomore season with the Tigers, he started using heroin in addition to cocaine and alcohol. And then, in a colossal blunder, he started sleeping with, and introducing drugs to, the 18-year-old daughter of the team’s owner, a billionaire businessman and entrepreneur named Nicholas Kuchin. The girl wound up overdosing and nearly dying, the tabloids went nuts, and at the end of the season, Joe was history in Detroit.
    •
    According to the Homicide Team’s notes and photographs, obtained for me by a subcontractor of my company who was an expert at illegally accessing government computers, DeVoss’s setup for his death paintings was somewhat ingenious.
    The subject was placed on a chair, in profile, in front of a large canvas on an easel.
    Directly in front of