The Promisor: A Suspense Thriller

by Dustin Stevens

  “A single shot with a high-powered rifle fired from distance,” Reed said.

  “Didn’t you say the killing down in Gallipolis looked and felt like an assassination?” Grimes replied.

  Body still poised on the front edge of the chair, Reed glanced from the screen to Grimes, dropping his chin no more than a centimeter.

  “You have any friends over in Newark?” he asked.

  “Not on the police force,” Grimes said, adding no more as he reached for the mouse beside him. Maneuvering it across the desktop, he pulled a new web browser up onscreen and typed Newark Police Department in the search bar.

  Gaze fixed on the screen, he released the mouse and grabbed up the receiver on his phone, dropping it down beside the device and flipping it to speaker before dialing.

  “No time like now to make some, though,” he added.

  Saying nothing, Reed reached out and placed his hand on Billie’s neck. Clenching his fingers, he worked at the skin and fur along the length of her spine, squeezing several times before running his palm down the length of her back.

  Practiced movements that she accepted without so much as glancing up, merely leaning her weight against his leg as he went.

  A stance they both maintained as the line began to ring, especially loud in the quiet of the office, sounding out three times before being snatched up.

  “Newark PD,” a male voice answered. Gruff and harried, in just two words the kind of afternoon the man was having became apparent, the opening resembling more of a demand than a greeting.

  “Hello, my name is Captain Wallace Grimes with Columbus Police, may I speak to your chief, please?”

  “This is who?” the man said, barely listening to a word that was previously shared.

  “Captain Grimes with CPD,” Grimes repeated, raising his voice slightly. “Calling on behalf of Governor Cowan and the State BCI.”

  Given most any other circumstance, Reed might have allowed a corner of his mouth to curl up. Perhaps even a bit of a chuckle at the captain having to both exert his status and align himself with Cowan, two things Reed knew for a fact the man hated.

  As was, he merely waited, continuing to stare intently at the phone as the man sighed loudly before saying, “Hold on.”

  Thrown to background music before either of them could so much as respond, the sound of an old Sinatra tune came over the line. A static-riddled rendition of “New York, New York,” that Reed guessed to be someone’s tongue-in-cheek take on the name of their own hometown, the song making it as far as Old Blue Eyes claiming to be top of the heap before it mercifully came to a halt.

  “Prentiss,” a man that sounded less gruff but just as frazzled as his predecessor answered.

  “Chief Prentiss,” Grimes said, Reed not sure if he could see the man’s name on the webpage before him or was simply guessing that they had reached the person they were looking for. “This is Captain Grimes with the CPD, working in tandem with Governor Cowan and the State BCI.”

  Much like the man before him, Prentiss sighed loudly. A loaded sound making it quite clear that he either didn’t have time for this or didn’t appreciate the state already calling to lean on him.

  Most likely, both.

  “Hey, Captain,” he managed, the clear sound of movement audible in the background. Drawers opening and papers being moved about. “What can I do for you?”

  “I apologize for calling,” Grimes said, “but we have reason to believe there might be some connection between the shooting that took place there this afternoon and another our office is currently investigating.”

  All sound seemed to bleed away as the man asked, “What kind of connection?”

  Flicking his gaze across the desk, Grimes nodded toward Reed, giving him the floor.

  An invite that took just an instant to register before Reed nudged himself forward another half inch, just barely remaining in contact with the edge of the chair.

  “Chief, this is Detective Reed Mattox. My partner and I have been investigating a murder two days ago involving a .300 Winchester Magnum bullet fired from long range at a woman just outside her front door. Can you confirm if this matches with the incident you currently have there in Newark?”

  Complete silence was the initial response. Dead air that dragged on for several seconds before Prentiss muttered, “Are you telling me we could be dealing with a serial?”

  “I don’t know for sure, sir, but my partner and I would like permission to come take a look.”

  “How fast can you get your asses over here?”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The clock sitting at half past six meant Reed missed the worst of the afternoon traffic. That first hour at the end of the workday when the entire I-270 outer belt and a fair number of the freeways bisecting it were little more than parking lots. Five-lane corridors moving at a pace somewhere between zero and twenty miles an hour as thousands of people poured out of their high-rise offices and headed for the suburbs and beyond.

  A problem that elected officials and corporate heads had been claiming for years would begin to relent with the advent of telecommuting, though Reed had yet to see any sign of it.

  Bypassing the worst of it while sitting tucked away in Captain Grimes’s office meant that by the time they got on the road, things were at least moving. They were much denser than Reed would have preferred, forcing him to pay more attention to traffic conditions that he anticipated, but they still allowed them to make the trek from The Bottoms to Newark in right at forty minutes.

  A length of time that had done nothing to abate the crowd gathered outside the site of the shooting, whatever buzz Reed had noticed in the background of that initial news report seeming to have tripled. A throng of vehicles and people threatening to choke out the tiny subdivision, everything from news vans to police cruisers stuffing the streets.

  Interspersed between them were crowds of onlookers. Clumps of people far too large to all be residents, many having wandered in on foot to stand vigil or satisfy morbid curiosity or even just to be the first to take a selfie and post it online.

  Tragedy in the age of social media.

  Pushing the sedan as close as the assembled mass of humanity would allow, Reed gave up when the GPS on the dash of his sedan said they were still two blocks out. Opting against using the siren and lights to clear the street, knowing it would only draw unwanted attention from gawkers and media alike, he instead eased up on the curb in front of a sprawling home with a stucco exterior and red Spanish tile roofing.

  A design that looked completely out of place for the location, made even more pronounced by the rock beds lining the front, succulents and cactuses planted throughout. A faux pas in décor Reed couldn’t imagine anybody actually pointing out given that the place was nothing short of palatial, easily dwarfing the farmhouse he called home.

  As did many of the others nearby, the lone characteristic they all seemed to have in common being that they were enormous. An enclave with a minimum net worth of a million dollars or more to gain entry.

  A fact Reed filed away as he clipped Billie to her short lead, the two of them taking off toward their intended destination.

  Eschewing the sidewalk, Reed led her right down the center of the street. His badge tucked from view, he aimed to resemble nothing more than a man out with his dog. An area resident taking an evening stroll, hoping to get a better view of what happened.

  A ruse he did his best to maintain, threading his way among the crowd. A gathering that grew more tightly bunched as they progressed, Reed forced to shoulder his way through the last ten yards or so.

  An effort that earned him a great many grunts and hushed complaints, no doubt a couple of hostile gestures as well, before finally presenting himself at the head of the driveway to the address Prentiss gave him earlier. A stately brick home rising two-stories in height, the pitch of the ground falling away slightly to one side, just as he had seen on the news report in Grimes’s office.

  What he hadn’t notice
d then was the handful of wooden stanchions lining the front of the property. Easily erected pieces that Reed normally saw employed at city street fairs and festivals, used for keeping traffic at bay.

  Meant to handle crowd control tonight, an officer from Newark PD was positioned at either end of each barricade. A group numbering a dozen in total, offset by media easily outpacing them by a ratio of two-to-one. Reporters and their corresponding camera people all jockeying for the best position, lobbing one question after another to anybody exiting the house.

  A scene Reed had no desire to become a part of as he approached the northern end of the impromptu blockade. Reaching to his back pocket, he pulled out his badge and flashed it to the officer, a young woman with sandy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a name tag identifying her as Dianason on her chest.

  “Detectives Mattox and Billie, State BCI,” Reed said, hating the words every bit as much as Grimes earlier. “Detective McKeon is expecting us.”

  Twisting her chin to the side, she grabbed for the microphone clipped to her collar. Depressing the button on the side of it, she said, “Detective McKeon, I’ve got two detectives here from the state that say you’re expecting them?”

  Releasing her grip on it, she waited no more than a few seconds before getting a response. A string of barely audible words prompting her to take a step to the side. Grasping the edge of the stanchion, she created a gap just over a foot wide.

  “Go ahead, he’ll meet you out front.”

  “Thanks,” Reed said, leading Billie on a diagonal from the corner toward the front door. A path directly across the spongy grass of the front yard, their arrival timed with the appearance of a man in the doorway. Wearing paper booties over his shoes and latex gloves on his hands, he stopped just inside the threshold, peering down a trio of steps at them.

  “You the guys from state?”

  “Yes, sir,” Reed replied. Pointing to himself, he said, “Mattox,” before moving to his partner, “Billie.”

  “Damned glad to see you both,” the man said. “Come on up.”

  Doing as instructed, they climbed the short flight of steps. Passing through the front door into a foyer with hardwood floors and a staircase rising before them, Reed led Billie over to the side. Finding a spot against the wall well beyond the flow of foot traffic, he said, “Down,” waiting for her to do as instructed before coiling the leash on the floor beside her.

  “Thanks for clearing the way for us,” Reed said, falling in beside McKeon. A man in his late forties with a heavy five o’clock shadow and a head of dark curls that was in the throes of both thinning and receding.

  Looking as if he had been awake for days, his eyes were red, the front of his chinos heavily wrinkled.

  “Thanks for getting here so fast,” McKeon replied, leading him past the staircase and down a narrow hallway through the center of the home. “As much as I hate to say this, I almost kind of hope this is connected to whatever you’re working.”

  If anyone outside of the profession ever asked Reed, he would claim to have no idea what the man meant. He would feign indignance and say such a wish was never acceptable, toeing the line that was expected for all officers when speaking in public.

  In truth, though, he knew exactly what McKeon was getting at. A thought he himself had been trying to keep at arm’s length for two days now, never wanting to see another person harmed, but knowing that often that was how cases were ultimately solved.

  The more scenes there were, the more chances for connection. Patterns to be examined. Victims to be analyzed.

  A singular incident could be kept as clean as possible, but with each subsequent one, the chances of error rose significantly.

  “That bad, huh?”

  Chapter Fifty

  When Reed asked the detective if the scene was that bad, he didn’t mean it literally. Based on the comment that had just been made, he was referring to the attached difficulty. A referendum on how precise the killing was and how hard it would be to unravel.

  A statement that inadvertently ended up carrying the dual meaning of also being literal, the site somehow even worse than the one that had been waiting for him in Gallipolis a couple of days before.

  Standing on the edge of it, his feet and hands both covered to match McKeon and the others moving throughout the house, two things immediately jumped out at Reed. Most obvious was the fact that the body of the victim had not yet been removed.

  A man that McKeon had said was named Avery Lawson, his age just a couple of years older than Reed.

  Resting face down on the tile, his arms and legs were close to his side, the lack of smears on the tile indicating he was already gone by the time he landed, not to move again.

  Dressed in boxers and a black t-shirt, the dark color helped to obscure his exit wound, the cloth stiff with dried blood.

  A centerpiece that would have been bad enough on its own, made infinitely more so by the murder having taken place in the bathroom. An enclosed space formed almost entirely from glass and white tile. Pristine surfaces that highlighted the blood spatter coating them and provided virtually no resistance as the droplets had streaked south.

  Vertical lines wrapped around the perimeter of the room, starting at various heights before ending in a dark crease where the walls met the floor.

  A scene snatched directly from a cheap horror film, the interior of the room shifting from clean and bright to splatter painted in an instant.

  Upon Reed’s first arrival, McKeon had asked the pair of criminalists working the scene to step outside for a few minutes. Given the tight constraints of the area, he said he wanted Reed to get a full view of what took place, leaving him alone as all three individuals retreated back to the kitchen nearby.

  A space that had been commandeered into a decontamination point of sorts, the floor covered with plastic, allowing people entering or exiting the scene to clean or change as needed.

  An endpoint to the narrow hallway running along the back of the home, providing access to the bathroom and a neighboring laundry room before reaching a second stairwell on the corner.

  A layout that had made what happened almost too easy.

  Turning his body perpendicular to the doorway, Reed put his back to the kitchen and the trio of people waiting silently there. Rotating his head, he peered out to his left, looking past the window positioned directly across from the bathroom and the bullet puncture in the center of it.

  A hole almost a centimeter across, the edges jagged, with small cracks spiderwebbed out in various directions.

  Eyes narrowed, he peered past the short backyard enclosed by a wooden privacy fence that he was told sloped downward thereafter, falling away to the highway below. A drop of nearly twenty feet matched on the far side by the other half of a ravine.

  A chunk of rugged ground covered with thick forestation, not a single structure visible.

  A setup that couldn’t help but conjure images such as those down in Gallipolis.

  Letting his gaze trace over the opposing hillside, Reed tried to spy any potential firing locations. Shooter’s nests like the one across from the Salem home where somebody could lay in wait.

  An exercise that he eventually let go for the time being, the possibilities too numerous to attempt from where he was standing.

  A job better left to Billie in the very near future.

  Imagining the bullet being fired from somewhere in the thick vegetation nearby, Reed rotated his focus back. A full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc with his gaze returning to the interior of the bathroom.

  Based on the blood patterns present and the positioning of Lawson on the floor, it appeared that he had been standing in front of the sink when the bullet struck. Smashing into the left side of his chest, it had tossed him sideways into the back wall, displaced energy flinging him against the tile.

  Hitting hard enough to bounce back, he had toppled to the floor as a fair bit of his blood supply seeped out, the man’s final moments remarkably close to t
hose of Cara Salem.

  Letting his focus linger on the macabre spread before him for another moment, Reed etched the scene into his mind. Inhaling deeply, he drew in the scent of blood in the air. Allowed the taste of copper to rest across his tongue.

  A conscious inclusion of all his senses, returning him to those first moments standing outside the home near the Ohio River.

  The last thing he would have ever wanted was for the same thing that happened to Cara to occur to someone else. A truly horrendous ending that nobody deserved, but certainly not someone as highly regarded as her or - as Reed imagined he would soon find out - the man on the bathroom floor behind him.

  People that must share some commonality beyond their manner of death that they were now entrusting him and Billie to find.

  Fast.

  Letting that thought steel him for whatever came next, Reed turned away. Moving in long strides, he stalked down the hallway, drawing the attention of all three waiting for him in the kitchen.

  “What do you think?” McKeon called, asking as Reed was less than halfway there. “Same guy?”

  “It’s early,” Reed replied, “but based on what I saw, I’d be far more surprised if it wasn’t than if it was.”

  Arriving on the edge of the open space with counters extended in both directions beside him, Reed kept his focus on McKeon as he asked, “Has the M.E. been by yet?”

  “Left about a half hour ago,” McKeon replied. “Released the body whenever we’re ready, but I wanted you to have a look before we moved him.”

  Dipping his chin in a slight nod of appreciation, Reed said, “The news report earlier made it seem like the shooting took place this afternoon, but based on the man’s attire and the drying of the blood in there...”

  Taking it no further, he let the impending question hang, McKeon picking up on where it was headed and replying, “Yeah. M.E. put time of death at ten to twelve hours ago, which is when his wife said he would have been getting ready for work.”