by L V Gaudet
He looks up in annoyance. Damned bells, one of these days…
Without pause, he shuffles down the aisle between tables towards the back.
“Afternoon, Harry. We haven’t seen you in here in a while,” a plump waitress calls out to him.
He grunts and waves in response, not turning to look at her.
He sits at a table at the back of the coffee house, joining another elderly man already sitting there drinking coffee and eating pie. He is slightly hunched over the table, his coat and hat from another era carefully hung on the coat rack near the table.
The waitress is on William by the time he settles himself.
“Your usual, Harry,” she smiles, setting a small plate with blueberry pie and whipped cream in front of him. She turns over his cup, filling it with coffee before hurrying off.
“Anderson,” William nods to the elderly man sitting across from him.
Anderson nods back.
“Just like the old days.” Anderson’s eyes crinkle with his smile and his grin is more toothless than toothy.
“Yeah, just like the old days.” William sips his coffee and grimaces. “Coffee is just as bad too.”
“That’s why you always come here.”
Anderson’s expression sobers. “That boy of yours doesn’t know how to keep a low profile, does he?”
“He’s always had trouble not bringing attention on himself.” After a moment of thought William adds, “And the family.”
“He came to see you.” It’s not a question. Anderson knows about the visit.
“He came to talk about David. He took off with that girl. He’s a bigger fool than Jason. The police are looking for them. Jason came to warn me they’d be coming to talk to me; to Marjory too.”
“Are you worried?”
“A little. Some days she’s more lucid, some days not so much. No way to know what she might say on a bad day. If they start talking to her too much, asking too many questions, she could go off into one of her fogs, reliving a memory.”
“The organization is concerned about that too. We have other problems too. Your boy is getting into trouble again. He has another kid under his roof, a runaway. The kid was already there. I’m not sure if it’s a setup.”
“The organization?” William wrinkles his brow.
“The authorities. There is a detective on him who has gone off the grid. He is not following the rules. He is not one of ours, we don’t control him. He is determined to bring your boy down, David too, no matter what it takes.”
“That’s a long stretch, don’t you think? Them planting a kid in a place like that?”
“I don’t think they planted him. The kid has no idea about what is going on. But the authorities knew he is there and didn’t remove him. They’re probably watching to see what happens.”
“And Jason bit.”
“He bit. He could have ignored the kid, or got rid of him. But he didn’t, just like the other two.”
“David and Cassie.”
“The kid is a complication. He’s going to bring too much attention if they bring Jason in for harbouring a runaway. The organization ordered him removed from the situation.”
William’s eyes drop, trying to hide the sadness. He knows what that means. The kid is a package.
“Do you know where David and Cassie are?” Anderson asks.
William tries to keep his expression unreadable.
“David, no. Cassie, I have a hunch. Are they…”
“Just David. He’s back in the fold. The organization is watching him. It doesn’t look good. They’re assessing him. Jason didn’t teach him well enough. He doesn’t seem to understand how far the mess will reach, or the clean up.”
“So, he’s doing jobs.”
“Carefully chosen ones.”
“And Cassie?”
Anderson shrugs. “They aren’t looking for her. Either they know where she is, or she’s dead.” He gives William a meaningful look. He thinks William knows where Cassie is.
“But you know where David is,” William says.
“I do. He’s holed up with that young lady, the one he didn’t kill. They’re testing him and I’m pretty sure the man deciding his fate is setting him up to fail.”
William’s jaw works. Jason’s foolishness in keeping those kids, his recklessness, is going to hurt others yet. I’m always cleaning up that boy’s messes.
Anderson looks at him levelly.
William looks away. He knows what is coming and doesn’t want to hear it.
“William,” Anderson says softly. It’s the first time in the decades of their association that he has ever spoken William’s name.
William looks at him, sees the pain in his eyes, the regret.
“It’s time,” Anderson says.
“No,” William says. “Not yet.”
“You need to clean up this mess before they do.”
“Don’t I always clean up my own messes?”
“You are not as young as you used to be.”
“Neither are you.”
“You’ve got me there.” Anderson smiles. His smile drops. “She has to disappear.”
34Confrontation
“He is on the move again,” the voice on the phone says. “He came back for a day and left again.”
Jim grunts. “Did you manage to get anyone on him this time?”
“We did but he lost him.”
“Damn. Do you have any idea where he’s going?”
“That runaway kid hiding out here sometimes, he confronted the kid then let him stay in his room while he was gone. He wanted it to look like he was here,” the voice chuckles.
“Yeah, so?” Jim is getting impatient.
“The kid is missing.”
“He’s a runaway. That’s what they do, they run.”
“McAllister was bent out of shape about it. Could be he’s looking for the boy.”
“Maybe, I doubt it. It doesn’t feel right. He’s just a runaway kid. I don’t peg McAllister for a pedophile. It doesn’t match his profile. He might have used the kid to make it look like he’s there, but he’s not about to chase after him.”
“I don’t think the kid left.”
“What are you saying?”
“The cowboy.”
Jim swore under his breath. “He is just a kid. Why did you let that happen?” His anger is mounting. Yet another victim he failed. “You get someone on him, shake down the cowboy and find out what he did with that kid. You are sure it was the cowboy?”
“No, but he’s the most likely.”
“Get on him.”
Jim hangs up, turning his attention to Lawrence.
“You find anything on McAllister’s sister yet?”
“I haven’t found her yet, but I did learn something else interesting.”
“What?”
“The judge who let McAllister go, I’m pretty sure he was in someone’s pocket.”
“I’m sure a few of them are. What does that have to do with McAllister?”
“McAllister knows where the bodies are. Hell he buried some of them. We both know you don’t bury that many bodies in one place without involving a lot of people. There’s some kind of killer conspiracy going on here.”
“Drop the puns and get to the point.”
Lawrence sneers wolfishly.
“There has to be one hell of a large organization involved.”
“You are theorizing.”
“I learned something about my predecessor and his obsession.” His grin falters. “I don’t think he killed himself. He was obsessed with something before his death. All those files he left me, a lifelong career of obsession over finding something, or someone.”
“Go on.”
“I dug deeper. There is something missing. One of the boxes I didn’t think mattered was the key to finding the kids McAllister had. But something is still missing. I studied the rest of the files in that box. I dug into his past.”
His eyes are haunted now.
“He knew.”
“He knew.” Jim frowns. “Knew about what?”
“All of this, the bodies. That was his obsession, and it’s bigger than you can imagine.”
He shakes it off.
“Forget that, I don’t know enough yet. About the judge, I think he was given orders to let McAllister go. They may have killed him after and made it look like a suicide.”
“How much do you know and how much can we prove?” Jim asks.
“Nothing. I’m not sure if he was paid off or blackmailed. I talked to the people who would really know if there is anything worth knowing, his house staff, ex-staff too. There is nothing on him I can prove, but there are rumours.”
“Of course there are.”
“There are rumours the judge may have had some unconventional tastes. He has some secrets hidden pretty deeply himself, and probably needed help hiding them.”
“Shit, every scrap we uncover just makes this thing bigger and the real answer further from our reach.”
Anderson’s words haunt Jason. They replay over in his head.
“You just brought a big pile of crap on your family and I don’t know if I can protect them. You keep messing up and one of these times it’s going to hurt people.”
He’s talking about David and his obsession. He’s crazy. He is damned impulsive, out of control, and downright nuts; dangerous crazy and not just to himself. He has lost touch with reality.
It’s David’s mess, the damned fool, taking that woman again. But it is all on me. They’re putting his mess at my feet. It’s my fault because I made him what he is.
“We can’t control everyone, and a few of those we can’t are asking too many questions and digging too deep. They are asking about their Jane Doe and Katherine Kingslow. But that is just an excuse. They are really chasing down the larger beast.”
Detective McNelly. He discovered there’s something more than David killing women. David’s fault. No, I can’t put that on him, can I? That’s on me. I knew I had to get rid of David, put a stop to him.
Kill him.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried to protect him all those years, both of them. Instead, I tried to get him caught, put away. It went so wrong. They weren’t supposed to find the graves.
“I came to warn you. He’s your mistake and your responsibility. The management knows. They’re watching and when it comes down it’s going to come down hard.” Anderson’s words.
If they clean up, they will do a thorough job. Not just David and that woman, me, that fat detective, everyone touching this.
Mom, Dad.
Sophie.
Cassie.
Hell, they already took the kid.
Jason feels sick with the knowledge.
“They are going to talk to your mother,” Anderson had warned. “You have to fix this before things go bad. Management will clean it up if you don’t.”
“I have to fix this,” Jason says. “I have to do what I should have done before, make this all stop. I have to find David and end this. McNelly will give up on his Jane Doe easy enough; he probably already thinks she is dead; Katherine too, probably. But he’s not going to stop until he gets David. It’s personal for him.
I have to give him David, his girlfriend too, their bodies anyway. Murder suicide? I’ll figure it out. First I have to find him. How?
Anderson! You don’t drop under the radar of the organization.”
Jason wanders the park path. It’s a heavily treed park with wide expanses of manicured lawns and gardens, flowering trees and bushes, and filled with a maze of meandering paved paths to keep visitors from getting bored. The park is busy. No one seems to care who else is there. Finally, he spots it. The bench is where it was described, tucked away, almost hidden.
He sits down to wait.
He watches joggers go by, cyclists, people walking and rollerblading. A dog stops to sniff him out before its owner calls it back and it trots away.
Time stretches and so does his wait, the sun slowly moving West across the sky.
The urgent pressure in his bladder becomes too much and he gets up to slip behind a tree to urinate where no one will see him, he hopes.
He waits another few hours before his rumbling stomach pushes him to give up.
“Anderson, you bugger, you aren’t coming, are you?”
Jason gets up and starts walking down the path, following the curve that puts the bench out of sight.
He stops after going some distance.
“He’s old. Did he forget? No, he’s sharp. No senility there. Maybe he just refuses to help.”
A look of alarm crosses his face.
Jason turns and races back down the path, arriving at the bench out of breath, looking around.
A small folded slip of paper sits on the bench where he spent the past hours waiting. It is small enough to be easily missed, but he knows he didn’t.
He races back to the path, looking up and down it, and just catches a glimpse of the back of a stooped over old man in a coat and hat that have gone out of fashion decades before vanishing around the bend in the other direction.
Old man hat. Old man coat.
“You old bugger.”
Jason returns to the bench, picking up the paper and unfolding it.
It contains an address and nothing more.
“David,” he says.
William McAllister leaves the path, cutting through an almost invisible deer trail where the trees and bushes are thick. His old man walk is unmistakeable. He curses his aging body and its loss of strength, his legs already feeling the strain.
Jason wanders an old used car lot. All of the vehicles have seen better days. Most are cheap. He scowls at the beat up heaps that would be better off in a salvage yard. Few look like they can handle a long trip. He doesn’t dare bring attention to himself by trying to access a larger sum of money, so it’s one of these or nothing. Stealing a truck would be too risky.
A tired looking salesman in a suit that looks as worn out as the cars comes trotting over with a forced smile on his face.
“Hi, I see you eyeing up that baby.”
Jason considers ignoring him, still scouting the lot for something useful, debating whether the salesman will save him time or just spend too long on sales pitches for something completely useless.
“How about this one?” the salesman suggests helpfully, trying to draw Jason towards a sedan with a higher price tag and bigger commission.
“I need a truck.”
The salesman pauses to think, changing course.
“I have just the thing over here.” He leads Jason towards a garish attention grabber with oversized rims, aftermarket exhaust, and flames decals ripping down each side.
Jason looks at him. “Do I look twenty?”
“No, you are right, power, no flash. I know.” He leads him to another truck.
It is a step above an old farm truck beater that is not road worthy enough to insure to drive on the road, but still serves a purpose on the farm.
The truck has a cap covering the box with a pull up door that closes against the top of the tailgate, making it impossible to see what’s inside the box.
“Is it insurable?” Jason asks.
“It just passed inspection,” the salesman says.
Falsified, no doubt, Jason thinks.
“It’ll do,” Jason says.
They go inside the small dealership building to fill out the paperwork, Jason paying cash and using false identification.
The deal completed, the salesman waves Jason off as he drives away.
“Enjoy your new truck Mr. Donaldson.”
Four days later, Jason is sitting in the truck parked behind the detached garage of a home across the street from a small old home in a small town filled with small old homes.
Between the house and garage he has a view of the house across the street, but would be overlooked by anyone passing on the street. He already made sure no one was home before bo
rrowing their yard.
He sips a coffee and chews on a sandwich he had gotten to go at a motel restaurant in the next town, watching the house across the street.
Billy tries to breathe slowly. It feels like the air is running out.
I’m suffocating. Panic swirls. He imagines he sees tiny lights dancing before his eyes. His eyelids are still closed; blindfold tied uncomfortably tight and the gag half choking him.
He can’t get away from the stink. It’s his own stink; sweat, urine, and feces. He had soiled himself a few times. It was unavoidable. The worst is the sweat, that sharp rank stink of fear sweat.
It is nothing but black. Distant sounds. He hasn’t moved in hours. Or rather, he hasn’t been moved in hours. He’s laid there so long, tied painfully, unable to move, his arms and legs running through a series of loops of pain, numbness, no feeling, pins and needles, and back to pain.
He’s been fading in and out of consciousness, or sleep, he isn’t sure which, for a time that feels stretched endlessly long.
My arms and legs are probably going to fall off. Man, this hurts! I’ve got to move. I’ve got to get out of here.
Icy blood courses through his veins, his heart pounding too fast.
He hears movement. A scrape. A voice.
What’s he saying?
The words are garbled. Senseless.
Ryan comes home after blowing off his anger from seeing Elaine with Trevor. He drove around until the anger finally seeped out of him. Thankfully Cassie and Jane didn’t return to lecture him more.
Elaine startles when the door opens and Ryan walks in.
“Ryan, you’re back.”
“I’m back.” He drops his bag with his clothes at the door.
Their greeting is muted, both feeling the growing expanse of distance between them and feeling awkward for it.
“Did you do much while I was gone?” Ryan asks, carefully keeping his voice neutral.
“Not really.”
It’s not like I’m allowed to go anywhere or do anything. Elaine pushes down the resentment pushing up in her. It’s not his fault. It’s to keep us safe. But I’m going crazy sitting here day and night, trapped in this house.