Mounted

by E. H. Reinhard

  “I think you’d like me better alive,” Courtney said.

  “Whatever,” William said. “I don’t much care for you either way. You’re a head and a set of hands that I need to practice with. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  He closed in on her and put his left hand against her upper chest, looking for the mark for his knife. She didn’t pull away or make a sound but instead leaned into his hand.

  William backed off. “No.” He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you? Are you some kind of nutcase or something?”

  “Free me. Let me show you.” She flashed him the same smile she’d shown a moment earlier.

  William took another step back. He ran his hand along the back of his neck while keeping his gaze on the woman. “You were all full of piss and vinegar last night—screaming, kicking, fighting, all normal reactions. Now, whatever this is, isn’t normal. Hmm. I have a hunch you’re trying to play little games with me. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to clean up. Give me one second. I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going? Stay here with me.”

  “Nah, I think you need to see something.” William turned, set the knife back on the table, and left the room.

  He entered the basement den and looked down at the rotting mount of Kelly Page propped against the side of the end table—the only mount he hadn’t smashed to pieces in his fit of anger and frustration. He took it in his hands, lifted it from the floor, and turned it to face him. The skin looked as if it had deteriorated even more since being removed from the wall. The pungent smell coming off her had only intensified—that was of no consequence as it would do fine for what he needed. He walked back across the basement, keeping the mount behind his back, and reentered the room where Courtney was shackled to the wall.

  “I’m going to have you look at something for me, and then we’ll see if you change your tune a bit,” William said. He stood before her, the mount hanging from his right hand behind his back.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  William pulled the mounted head from behind his back and held it up before her face. “This is your fate.”

  William looked around the side of the mount to get her reaction. Courtney had a look of confusion on her face.

  “Here. Get a good look. Smell her.” He pressed the rotted flesh of Kelly Page’s face against Courtney’s cheek.

  Courtney’s body jerked, and he took a few quick steps back as she vomited. She gagged again and fought to get the word help to come from her mouth.

  “Are you understanding this now?” William asked. “Is your fate clear to you?”

  Spittle flew from Courtney’s mouth. “Help!” she screamed once and again.

  “I thought you wanted to help me—you know, work something out,” William said over the woman’s earsplitting shrieks.

  He smiled, tossed the mounted head to the ground, and walked to the knife on the table.

  “Please, no!” she cried. “Help!”

  “There we go. That’s a little more like it.” William walked to her, found his spot on her chest as she jerked and wailed, and plunged the knife in.

  She went silent.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We’d waited for him to pull up the footage for the better part of ten minutes. He dragged the mouse one way and then back the other. I had a pretty good guess that I could have found the time in question about nine minutes earlier. While we’d been waiting, we’d identified the smell in the apartment as Limburger cheese—which he offered us, but we declined. He’d also informed us while we stood and watched him that we should refer to him as Big Paul as that’s what his friends called him. However, the thought of that man having many friends struck me as a bit far-fetched. I figured I’d just stick with Mr. Samson if I did need to address him by name.

  “Here. It’s playing at eight fifty-eight on Saturday. Like I said, it’s motion activated,” Mr. Samson said.

  “Right,” I said.

  We watched the laptop monitor as a car pulled in and parked in the back lot. Then a man exited the vehicle and walked back toward the apartment complex, disappearing from the screen. A moment later, the monitor went black. It flicked back on within seconds. I caught the time-stamp in the corner—9:33 p.m.

  “That’s her,” King said.

  The nose of her car approaching from the side of the building nearest her parking spot must have triggered the camera. We watched as she slowly pulled forward toward the parking spot. Then what looked like flashing lights lit the screen, illuminating the water shed and neighboring cars. Katelyn pulled into her parking spot. Headlights lit the back of her car as well as the strobing lights, which alternated between lighting the left and then the right side of her trunk. The lights continued for another few seconds before disappearing.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked. “Was she getting pulled over or something?” I looked at King standing at my shoulder, and his eyes were fixed on the laptop’s screen.

  I looked back and watched. Katelyn never left her vehicle. A moment later, the figure of a man walked to her driver’s door and lit up a flashlight. While the recording didn’t give us a clear view, the guy looked to be in a suit as opposed to a police uniform. We looked on as the man stood at her window for roughly thirty seconds. An arm came from the driver’s window and held a couple of items out toward the man. His light pointed at whatever he was handed. A moment later, the man took a step back. Katelyn’s driver’s door opened, and she stepped out. The man escorted her off screen. When the two walked off camera, the footage went black, only coming back on with a time-stamp roughly three hours later, when another vehicle pulled in and parked. We continued to watch the footage until it showed daybreak, just a few minutes in recorded footage later—no one approached the vehicle again.

  “Did you want me to rewind it?” Mr. Samson asked.

  “Not yet.” I looked at King. “What time did the roommate say she’d noticed the car?”

  He appeared to be in thought. “It’s in my case file, but if memory serves, she said around nine yesterday morning.”

  “All right.” I looked at Mr. Samson. “Mind if I try to pull up that time?”

  “I’d prefer to be in charge of my own equipment,” he said.

  I shrugged and let out a breath.

  He went back and forth on the timing bar at the bottom of the video screen for roughly a minute.

  “Try a quarter inch to the right. You’re still about eight hours behind where we need to be,” I said.

  “I’ll have it for you in a second,” he said yet didn’t obey my instruction. I was beginning to think he was just trying to keep King and me there as long as he could. Another three minutes later, he’d found the time and date we’d requested—right around where I’d asked him to move the scroll bar.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  The three of us watched the monitor as a woman, in daylight, walked around the corner of the building into the back lot and stopped in her tracks. From the build and style of hair, I figured it to be Jessi Bromley, the roommate. She approached the parked Hyundai belonging to Katelyn Willard slowly, rounded the driver’s side of the vehicle, and looked inside. She removed her phone from her pocket and made a phone call as she paced the lot back and forth behind the vehicle. Then she appeared to hang up and make another call.

  “Pretty much exactly as she described seeing the car and making the calls,” I said.

  “Agreed. I imagine, later in the recording, we’ll see the police respond, look around, the vehicle being removed, et cetera. Let’s rewind it back to where we think the abduction took place,” King said.

  Mr. Samson rewound the recording, and we watched the footage of her pulling in, parking, and walking back to the other car off screen with the man three more times.

  “Do you know how accurate the time is on that camera?” I asked.

  “Well, whatever timing method the camera uses has to be quartz, which even cheap quartz timing devices are norm
ally pretty accurate—within a couple seconds per month, normally. When I set the time on the monitoring equipment, I synchronized it with my atomic watch here.” Mr. Samson held out the watch on his wrist and turned it back and forth.” This timepiece receives a signal every night and is accurate to one second per one hundred thousand years.”

  A simple it’s accurate would have sufficed.

  “We’ll need that memory card,” I said. “Someone from the bureau will need to go through it and try to clean it up to see if we can get a better look at our suspect.”

  “As long as I get reimbursed for it, sure,” Mr. Samson said. “These go for about twenty bucks.”

  “It’s evidence in an investigation of a missing woman,” I said.

  “And they still go for about twenty bucks,” he said.

  Mr. Samson held out his hand, expecting me to give him a twenty, I assumed.

  I gave the guy my best not-screwing-around-or-giving-you-twenty-dollars face. “Are you sure?”

  He grumbled and pulled the card from his computer. “Fine.” He held it out toward me.

  I took it and placed it in my inner suit pocket. “Appreciate it. Thanks for your time, sir.” I motioned to King that we were leaving.

  We walked down the steps of the apartment to the front door.

  The apartment owner followed, and when I pulled the door handle to leave, he said, “Have them write my name as Big Paul if they include me in the news or paper or anything, so all my friends know it was me.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  I don’t believe Mr. Samson caught my sarcasm, for he thanked me and asked if I needed the spelling. I told him that I didn’t, and King and I left the apartment and walked to our cars. I looked back once to see Mr. Samson wave and give me a thumbs up.

  “Odd duck,” I said.

  “That’s putting it gently.” King put his back to his trunk and dug into his pocket. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, stuck it in his mouth and lit it.

  “Okay, what do we make of the footage?” I asked.

  King took a long drag from his smoke and exhaled. “I’m at a loss,” he said.

  “Well, this is your jurisdiction. Think it was someone from your department?”

  “No. On the second watching of the footage, I caught it. The procedure was wrong. The way the lights lit up was wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our lights spin in our marked cars—LEDs inside the roof-mounted light bars with a rotating reflector.”

  “The guy wasn’t in an official uniform. What about detectives?”

  “We have two unmarked cars. This is one.” He slapped the trunk lid he was leaning against. “The other mostly sits in our lot back at the station. Either way, neither goes home with anyone on the weekends, and again, the lights are different. We have strips in the top of the windshield and back glass. The strobe is five or six on red then over to blue. What was on the screen was back and forth. Here, look.” He walked to his driver’s door, opened it, and turned on the lights.

  I walked to the front of his car and took a quick look, verifying the pattern as different from the video.

  “No one has lights on any of their personal vehicles?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “So we have someone either from another jurisdiction, another branch, or someone simply posing as a cop who picked this girl up,” I said.

  He walked back to the trunk of his car, and I followed.

  “Could have been anything equipped with lights,” King said. “A fire chief’s truck, tow truck, EMT vehicle, security vehicle. Security vehicle could make sense. We should check to see if this complex contracts a company for that.” He finished his smoke in a few more drags, put it out against the bottom of his shoe, and held the butt in his hand.

  I was quiet for a moment, in thought. King threw a bunch of alternative ideas against the wall and quickly made his case that it wasn’t any of the vehicles from his office. I glanced down at his hand still holding the cigarette butt. I slid my sleeve up and looked at the time on my watch.

  “I have to get moving here,” I said. “We’ll check on a security company for this place, and as soon as we get the video processed, I’ll make sure your office gets a copy.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “We’ll be in touch, and thanks for shooting out here to meet me.” I walked to the door of my rental car.

  King left the trunk of his vehicle and walked to the driver’s door. “No problem,” he said.

  I hopped into my car and backed out of my parking spot. I briefly stopped into the front office of the apartment complex and confirmed they did not have any kind of security vehicles or a company that provided the service for them.

  I drove roughly a mile from Katelyn Willard’s apartment complex, turned into a parking lot, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed Beth. She picked up within a couple of rings.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Not in the middle of something are you?” I asked.

  “No. I’m driving to meet the parents of Kelly Page. I should be there in about five minutes. What’s up?”

  “Well, we have video of what I’m guessing is the abduction of Katelyn Willard from her apartment complex.”

  “Video? Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s fairly grainy, but you can see what goes down. Her neighbor had a motion camera on his patio. I think it was a cop who took her.”

  “What?” Beth asked. “A cop?”

  “Looked like it, as much as the chief deputy was trying to sway me away from the idea by presenting a bunch of alternative theories.”

  “Chief deputy?”

  “The chief deputy from the Oldham County Sheriff’s office met me out there. We had a look around and met with a neighbor together. Neighbor had the video footage.”

  “How did it go down?” Beth asked.

  I filled her in on the neighbor and gave her what we’d seen on the video.

  “But you don’t think it could have been anything other than a police officer?”

  “Or someone posing as one,” I said. “To me, the thing that sticks out is the way the guy approached the vehicle. He came up with a flashlight, must have had some words through her window, probably asked her to exit the vehicle, and she left with him. Nobody is going to do that unless they think they’re dealing with law enforcement. Plus, she left her car open with her purse, phone, keys, and all of that in there. To me, that sounds like ‘step out of the car and come back here.’”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right on that. So what’s the plan there?”

  “Not sure. I’ll turn the video in at the office, make sure the local sheriff’s department gets a copy, and I guess that’s it on it unless we can positively link the abduction with our guy.”

  “Okay. You’re headed back to the field office after you make your stops?” Beth asked.

  “I’m actually going to run back right now, drop off this memory card with the video, and then head back out to the scenes. But, yeah, I’ll be back there when I’m through for the day.”

  “All right. I’m just pulling up to my first stop. I’ll meet you back there this afternoon.”

  “Sounds good.” I clicked off, pulled up the navigation on my phone, and had it direct me back to the Louisville field office.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After my trip back to the field office that morning, I completed my rounds of viewing scenes or, more accurately, areas of town where the women had been last seen. By noon, I’d found the area where April Backer’s vehicle with the flat tire had been discovered. I walked the stretch of roadway, which was fairly rural, and saw nothing that could be described as evidence. I made notes in my notepad to find out where the vehicle currently was, to see if anyone had found the source of the flat tire, and to get a report from whoever had inspected the vehicle.

  From there, my trip took me back into the city. By one thirty, I’d walked the route around the University of Louisville
that Jennifer Pasco, the woman who was last seen leaving a house party and walking back to her place, would have taken. I spoke with a handful of college kids that lived in the home where the party had taken place—it seemed the party was a bit of a free-for-all and none of them knew the girl personally.

  From there, I headed back into the downtown area and visited the two locations where Kelly Paige and Trisha Floyd had been abducted somewhere between the bars they were at and their vehicles. I retraced the steps needed to get from point A to B at both locations and had talks with the bar staff as well as local business owners in the area. I discovered nothing new.

  At a quarter to four, I found myself sitting in a trendy downtown diner over a dressed-up steak-and-cheese sandwich, which was delicious. I jammed the last bit of the sandwich in my mouth and took a drink from my soda. The waitress passed, and I requested my bill. I wiped my hands on a napkin and scooped my phone from the small white-tableclothed table. The light on the top corner of my cell was flashing that I had an e-mail. I clicked the prompts to pull up the message. The e-mail was from Ball, asking me to check in when I got the chance. I took another drink of my soda and dialed him.

  “Ball,” he answered.

  “Hey, it’s Hank. I just saw your message.”

  “I just wanted to see if anything was shaking. I hadn’t talked to you or Beth today. I tried her a bit earlier, but she didn’t answer.”

  “She’s meeting with friends and family. I’ve just been out looking over the locations where these women were last seen.”

  “Anything at the spots?”

  “Zip. I don’t even know if you could really describe them as scenes. ‘Missing from somewhere between here and here’ doesn’t give you much to look at.”

  “Did you stop in at the paper that received the package yet?”

  “No. I was kind of thinking that maybe we should put together some kind of a press conference prior to doing that. An FBI agent walks into the paper and starts asking questions about the box that they had delivered, that contained what it did, and they could start spreading headlines. It doesn’t take too many brain cells for them to realize it got kicked up the ranks and there is legitimacy to it.”