Simon Says... Hide (Kate Morgan Thrillers Book 1)

by Dale Mayer

  At her side, Rodney pulled his coat jacket edges closer together against the Vancouver rain.

  “The world is crying today,” she murmured.

  “Not for this asshole,” he snapped.

  She looked at him and shook her head. “No, but let’s hope he has answers for us.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “We haven’t been lucky yet.”

  “We haven’t been lucky,” she said, “because we didn’t know the big picture. But the pieces are coming together.”

  “How the hell can you have so much faith in that Simon guy?” he asked abruptly.

  She looked at him, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I do.”

  “Well, nobody came up with anything to tie him to the cases,” he said grudgingly. “So Colby’s backed off on Simon being our number one suspect.” Then Rodney gave a snort and said, “Depends on if we can lock down his alibi for last night though.”

  Kate froze, struggling to not show her shock. She was about to face one of the hardest times of her career. She didn’t say anything at the time, as she stared at the dead pedophile, sitting in the driver’s seat of his registered vehicle, the Forensics team working around the body even now. “Do we have a time of death?” she asked the coroner.

  He shook his head. “He’s been dead at least six to eight hours. So, somewhere between midnight and four a.m. would be close.”

  She nodded slowly. “That’s a small window. We need to find out how long the vehicle was parked here.” With that, she headed into the coffee shop and asked the staff. Most of them had come back on at six this morning, and the vehicle had already been there. One of the new staffers coming on for his shift had called in the scene.

  With the names of those who had closed the night before, Kate stood outside and started phoning them. A couple she woke up, and some were angry, although their tone changed once she explained what the problem was.

  One had seen the vehicle there, but he wasn’t sure that anybody had been inside it. He’d left at 1:30 a.m., and the only reason he had noticed it was because he’d parked out back too. He couldn’t give any specific identification on the vehicle, just that a small truck was in the parking lot when he left, and it was a dark color. Which matched the description of this one perfectly. “Did you see anybody around it? Anybody coming to or from it?”

  “No,” he said. “Should be camera footage though.”

  “We’re getting that,” she said. After she hung up, she sought out the manager and asked, “Do you have security cameras?”

  He nodded and handed her a phone number. “I already requested that it be prepared for you. This number is for the security company. They should have the video feeds ready.”

  “Do you have any access?”

  “No,” he said. “If there’s anything suspicious, we contact them.”

  “Good enough,” she said. She headed back outside to call them. When she heard somebody at the end of the line, she identified herself, the business name involved, and the property address. “I’m looking for any activity around the parking lot in the back,” she said.

  “We can scan through it here, or do you want the feeds sent to you?”

  “I need the feeds,” she said instantly. “And I need them now. I’ll be in my office in about twenty minutes.”

  “Sure. Give me your email address, and we’ll send it to you immediately,” he said.

  When she hung up the phone, she walked to where Rodney was, glad to see the coroner here too. “I have the security feeds coming to my email, so I’m heading to the office to go over them.”

  Rodney nodded. “Let’s hope we have some forensics evidence on this one.”

  She stopped, turned to look back at the deceased male, and asked the nearby cops, “Anybody check his wallet yet?”

  “I have it here, if you want to take a look,” the coroner said.

  Kate and Rodney walked around to the side. “Anything missing?”

  “No cash—which makes it look like a robbery—and, even more so, no cards.”

  “So maybe it’s completely unrelated,” she murmured. “Or made to look like a robbery.” As she glanced into the back seat of the vehicle, she noted, “He’s got several suitcases here. I presume he was running.”

  “He probably had a decent amount of cash on him too,” Rodney pointed out. “So a robbery is then quite likely.”

  She thought about it and said, “That would make sense. We can check his bank records to see if he’d pulled out any money.”

  They spent another ten minutes studying the scene, before they returned to the office. By the time they made it back, she was chilled and damp. That was the thing about living in a coastal town like Vancouver; sometimes it was absolutely stunning, but, when the rains started, you felt like you would never get dry or warm again.

  At her desk, she searched through the video feeds. Lots of vehicles in the hours just before Starbucks closed, an amazing amount. She hadn’t realized just how many people were out at that hour. But then the nightlife in the city was always active.

  As she watched, vehicles came and went; then their victim’s truck pulled in slowly. She watched as Nico got out, looked around nervously, then walked rapidly into Starbucks. He came out a good ten or fifteen minutes later, a cup in his hand. He was joined by another man, whose back was to the video cameras. She studied the frame, straightening slowly. “I think it’s him,” she said in amazement.

  Rodney came to stand behind her. “You think who is him?”

  She reached out and tapped the man talking to the victim on her frozen screen. “I think this is the guy I saw outside Nico’s house.”

  “It would make sense,” he said.

  But then the one guy disappeared, and Nico got back into his vehicle. He sat there for a long moment. The other guy came back again with a cup of coffee and slipped into the passenger seat. They stayed like that, talking for at least another ten or fifteen minutes, while she waited impatiently. She didn’t want to speed up the video camera, even though she was dying to see what else happened. She didn’t want to miss anything.

  Then the second man got out, wearing a hat pulled low over his face. With the cup of coffee in his hands, he walked to his vehicle, which was just out of the shot.

  She swore and said, “Damn. I need to know what vehicle he drove.”

  “We can pick it up on the city cameras,” Rodney said, going over to his computer. “What time frame are you looking at?”

  “It’s one-fifteen a.m.,” she said, reading the time off the security footage. And, from that point on, she saw no action in that vehicle. The man who had been sitting in the passenger seat was the last person to see Nico alive. She watched clear through the recording, until the new shift of staff arrived, and somebody noticed he was in there. Then she shut it down and went back to the beginning and watched it again. “Blue pickup,” Rodney announced. “Same license plate as in your photo.”

  She turned in her seat. “The same one?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  She gave him a fat smile. Same one as Simon gave her too. “Now check,” she said, “to see if there was a second phone call, saying that his truck was stolen?”

  He looked over at her in surprise.

  “It was stolen the other night,” she said, “but I checked with the cops, and it was returned to him the next day.”

  He nodded in understanding. “So now the question is whether it was stolen again—which is highly unlikely—or whether he was driving that vehicle himself.”

  “From what I see on this video camera,” she said, “it’s him, the guy crawling out Nico’s window. Same stature, same framework, but I can’t get a picture of his face.”

  “Well, that won’t have been accidental,” he said. “He knew the cameras were there.”

  Owen spoke up from the other side of the room. “I’ve also run Nico’s bank account,” he said, “and five hundred was removed very early that morning—before his
death at about one-fifteen a.m.—from a branch downtown.”

  “Get those ATM camera feeds.”

  “Already ordered,” Owen said.

  “So, looks like our guy took Nico’s cash and his cards as well,” she said, with a nod. “No honor among thieves.”

  “Considering they were selling that little girl and bickering over the price, no honor at all,” Rodney said.

  “I need to talk to that little runt,” she muttered. She stood and pulled her wallet from inside her drawer and shoved it deep into her jacket pocket and zipped it up. With her keys in her hands, she looked at the two of them. “Anybody coming?”

  Rodney gave her a big smile and said, “Oh, thank you for the invitation.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “I don’t know if our killer’s armed and dangerous,” she said, “or just dangerous to little kids.”

  “Are we gonna kick some butt?” he asked, with interest.

  Her smile widened and deepened. “I hope so,” she said fervently. “I really hope so.” Just as she was about to head out, Colby called out to her.

  “Kate, come back here, please.”

  She held up a finger to Rodney, saying, “Just a minute.” As she walked into Colby’s office, he motioned at the door.

  “Close that, will you?”

  She closed it and said, “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I understand we have a new victim, and it’s connected to the existing cases. I want you to double-check Simon’s alibi for last night to make sure he’s not involved.”

  She knew this was it. Her D-day had come. She took slow deep breaths and said, “Sergeant, I can tell you right now that his alibi is good.”

  Colby looked at her, and a thunderous cloud crossed his face. “Please tell me that you didn’t—”

  Shoving her hands in her pockets, she rocked back on her heels and then gave a nod. “Actually I did.”

  “Fucking hell,” he roared.

  She took two steps and collapsed in the nearby chair.

  “He is a suspect,” he snapped.

  She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t. You guys were trying to make it look like he was a suspect, but he had no connection, outside of being a rescued child from thirty-one years ago,” she said boldly. “I get that everybody wanted him to look good for it, but he didn’t.”

  “He wasn’t cleared,” Colby snapped.

  She stiffened. “He was,” she said. “I listened to everything yesterday. Rodney did a full workup, trying to match him to everything, and couldn’t find anything. And, for the record, I didn’t plan it,” she said. He just glared at her. She shrugged and straightened. “Can I leave now?”

  “You know I should pull you off the case,” he snapped.

  “You don’t need to do that, Sergeant,” she said wearily.

  “Where are you heading?”

  “Out to the home of the same pedophile I saw leaving Nico’s place, where we found the child,” she said. “He was on the camera as the last person who approached Nico in his vehicle.”

  “And it’s definitely not Simon?” His gaze probed hers.

  “Definitely not,” she said, with emphasis. Inside she was trembling. The last thing she wanted to do was get sidelined for having done something improper. In her own mind, she knew Simon had nothing to do with it, but that didn’t mean everybody else was as sure.

  He gave a brief nod and added, “This isn’t over.”

  She gulped. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she whispered and quickly disappeared. She met Rodney at the elevator. He looked at her and said, “Problem?”

  “No,” she said, calmer than she felt. “Nothing more than usual.” As they approached the apartment she’d been to earlier—but both owner and truck were gone that first time—she walked over and knocked on the front door. There was no answer. Rodney went around to the parking lot to check for a vehicle.

  She knocked again and then picked up the phone and called Owen.

  As soon as he answered, he said, “We have a warrant.”

  “Good. I’m going in,” she said. She brought out her tools, popped the knob, and opened the door ever-so-slightly. Rodney came up beside her, one of them on either side the door. As he went high, and she went low, they pushed the door open and entered, calling out, “Police coming in. We have a warrant!”

  Only silence greeted them.

  She frowned as she stepped inside and looked around, doing a quick sweep around the small apartment first. Bedroom off to the left, living room straight ahead, kitchen on the right. Small bathroom between the living room and the bedroom. And the place was a hovel. It smelled as if no fresh air had been through here in weeks. It was nasty. But what was that odor from? She lifted her nose and sniffed the air again, frowning.

  Rodney looked at her and nodded. “Something dead was in here.”

  “But what?” she said quietly. They did a general search first and then got into the nitty-gritty details. She focused on the living room. Just something about it really drove her crazy. As she worked her way through it, moving pizza boxes, take-out containers, rolled-up bags of garbage, she realized they could have moved any number of things in here, and the resident never would have noticed.

  But the couch, where he sat in front of the TV, was clear, both sides. She removed the cushions, finding a number of things she didn’t want to question too closely, and one was a piece of pink ribbon. She stared at it quietly for a long moment, then picked it up with her gloved hand and placed it in a small evidence bag. “A pink ribbon here,” she said.

  “And that means what?”

  “Maybe nothing,” she said, “but our little princess had pink ribbons on her clothes.”

  He popped his head around the corner, looked at her, frowned, and said, “She was here?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you.” She kept going. When she came to a small notebook, listing a series of names, she frowned and put it into an evidence bag as well. But not before she took a couple photos of the list. She knew that the Forensic teams would come, but she wanted this moment to see for herself just exactly what was here and what was not.

  “I wish we had his phone,” she murmured. She quickly sent Reese a text, asking her to apply for a list of the phone calls from this perv’s phone. If they could get his phone records, that would help too. The kitchen itself was the cleanest part of the house, but clearly that was because he didn’t use it. She opened the fridge to find milk, cookies, a couple half-eaten sandwiches, a random jar of pickled jalapenos, and not a whole lot else.

  Obviously this was the fridge of a man who didn’t cook and had no intention of learning. He’d lived this way for a very long time. She was doing the run of his history, even as she searched the place. He was forty-nine years old and a twin. She froze at that and researched who his sibling was. When she got the name, she froze again.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  Rodney poked his head out of the bedroom. “Now what?”

  “He’s a twin, and his sister is one of the most preeminent psychologists in town. Dr. Yolynda Brown. We use her a lot for our cases and often call her in on our criminal trials. I was supposed to contact her about these cases but never got a chance to do so.”

  He looked over and frowned. “Well, I guess even pedophiles have family,” he said.

  She nodded, but something about it just felt terribly off. “I’ve notified Colby.” She kept reading the summary and realized that this perv had been picked up once and had served a couple years. He was on the record as an abuser but had kept a very low profile ever since.

  She pocketed her phone and kept going through the apartment. As long as they were here, she knew the perv wouldn’t come back, but she didn’t know if he understood that he’d lost his home base. Surely he had another base too. Yet, considering his current lifestyle, she was uncertain of that. She walked through to the bedroom and asked Rodney, “You find anything?”

  “Nothing incriminating, just nasty-assty shit
,” he said. “All kinds of condoms in the drawers, but all the packages are unopened.”

  “So he’s ready but not here maybe?”

  “Maybe, or he stopped using them.”

  “That’s possible too,” she said. “I hope so. Surely his DNA is bound to show up somewhere.” She glanced around, walked over to the window, drew back the curtains, and opened it wide. “Ground floor, minimal light, kept the curtains closed,” she murmured. “He was hiding.”

  “Pedophiles are always hiding,” Rodney said, “but hiding in plain sight. So we never know who the hell they are.”

  “Well, this one is about to be exposed,” she said, “because we’re about to get him.” She knew it was false confidence, but she was determined to solve this.

  “It would sure be good timing to have any fancy numbers your boyfriend could provide for you.”

  She froze at his use of the term. “Simon is hardly my boyfriend,” she said carefully.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “Could a safe be here?” She viewed the walls with interest, and he immediately stopped his search and started helping her.

  “It doesn’t look like the kind of place that would have a safe, does it?”

  “No, and I’m not too sure if this is actually a place he’d bring victims to or not,” she said. “It’s pretty unlived-in.”

  “You mean overly lived-in, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I mean, it looks lived-in for him but not for a child.”

  “Depends on how long he had them for,” he said. “That little girl Simon called in had been drugged all to hell before her neck was broken. Then the lost little girl you found at Nico’s place had also been heavily drugged for a long time too, so she’s not been consciously aware of what she went through for the last while. Which is a blessing in a way. I wonder how long Nico actually held her at his place.”

  “Good point,” she murmured. She studied the apartment with a new eye. “So this is where this perv lived,” she said, “but there’s no hiding place for kids in this dive.”