His Sweet

by Hildur Sif Thorarensen

  “It’s hard to estimate Mister Whiskers’ age, but if she considered him an adult seven years ago, he would have to have been at least been thirty then, don’t you think?” Yolanda said as she highlighted some names on her papers.

  “I guess so, but somehow I always imagined him to be older,” Tyne said. “More like forty-five when he got her and in his fifties now.”

  They all seemed to have had similar ideas but decided it wouldn’t be wise to eliminate anybody currently between thirty-five and seventy. As most people with lung cancer were sixty or older, they could eliminate a decent part of that list. After thoroughly examining each and every one, they ended up with 447 names.

  “Now that’s better,” Yolanda said. “Can we narrow it down any further?”

  “Well, I reckon he’s not likely to be a family man,” Tyne suggested.

  “Maybe we can look into truck drivers?” Solomon added.

  “It is possible he’s divorced, but I agree—he definitely does not have a loving wife, kids, and a golden retriever. I’d say it’s also likely that he lives in a house or at least in a large apartment with a basement.” She paused a moment, biting the inside of her cheek in thought. “Regarding the truck driving, did you find any information about what kind of vehicle was used in the kidnapping?”

  “Not really.” Solomon went over to the table they had filled with notebooks and examined the index Tyne had put together detailing the contents of each chapter. After some searching, he found the entry about the day of her disappearance. “No, it could be any kind of truck she had to climb up into. Even a big jeep.” He seemed disappointed in his lack of progress, if his grimace was any indication.

  “Well, we have a start, so don’t beat yourself up over it. Why don’t you go to the county’s Registry of Deeds and see if they’ll give you plans for the houses that have basements while Tyne and I put our internet stalking skills to good use and see whether these poor men have families or not.”

  “Ooh, can we go on social media and send them messages pretending to be somebody else and get information that way?” Tyne’s eyes sparkled as if she found the idea quite amusing. “I could be this lonely girl looking for a date, and you could be a divorced cougar wanting a good ol’ time.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary at this point. Let’s just stick to the databases we already have access to and see where that gets us. Solomon, you’re such a Tasmanian devil on that computer, would you mind also checking their marital status while Tyne and I try to find out whether these men have children and live alone?”

  “No problem, ma’am. I’ll get some doughnuts on the way; we have to play the part, you know.” He winked at them.

  “Way ahead of you.” Lily’s father was standing by June’s empty table, holding a box with fresh doughnuts. While she and Solomon were working on this case, Yolanda had asked June to take care of any local small matters. June had her office phone on divert as she drove around town, saving cats and solving neighborhood disputes. She was very happy with the change from the admin position, as the temporary promotion would give her a lot of experience.

  Truthfully, Yolanda was hoping she could make some alterations around the office after the case had been solved, one of those being that June would become a bigger part of their everyday work, and she herself could be more in the office and less out in the field. But that was a headache for another day. For now, it was back in the trenches, and despite not being overly fond of all the different data management chores, she was willing to do almost anything to save Lily.

  2025

  “What about this one?” Solomon was driving while Yolanda sat in the passenger seat, scouting the houses from the list. As June was out attending to some kids spray-painting a wall by the local train station, Tyne had to stay behind to hold the fort and couldn’t join them on the hunt. Solomon had been able to acquire plans for only a few of the buildings, and the girls had eliminated some names during their investigation. After cross-referencing all the information, they had managed to shrink the list by quite a few names, but that still left them with a bit over three hundred potential suspects.

  Solomon and Yolanda had then created a plan of the most sensible driving route before heading out to have a look at the houses—or stalk the owners, as Tyne liked to call it. The current house was the fifth on their list, a one-story brick-and-mortar with black window shutters and a roof that seemed in need of some repair.

  “I’m not sure about this one. I think it’s possible it might have a cellar, but it’s always hard to tell. Let’s ring the bell and see.” Yolanda stepped out of the car and approached the house. Their M.O. was for Solomon to remain in the car and keep watch while Yolanda went knocking on doors. She was to keep it short and not enter, allowing them to cover more ground more quickly. Just as she was about to cross the street, she saw one of the mosquito spray trucks approaching and instantly dodged back inside to prevent being covered in repellant.

  “Have they already started spraying for skeeters?” Solomon said, surprised. Mosquito season was apparently afoot, and when the pesky insect population reached its high point, the municipal government would send out pickup trucks that sprayed pesticide around the neighborhoods to thin the bloodsucking herds.

  “Truck’s gone, I’ll try again,” she said after giving it a few minutes for the bug spray to dilute in the air. She didn’t particularly enjoy bothering people, especially when it was highly unlikely they had anything to do with the case, but she knew this was their best option.

  She rang the doorbell and waited a moment, listening. When she didn’t hear anything from the other side, she tried again before walking around the house, attempting to see whether there were any basement windows in the back. As she went into the back yard, she saw a swing set at one end and children’s toys spread about. There was a shovel and a bucket as well as an inflatable swimming pool and two dolls stacked on top of one another inside a pull-along wagon. There were also basement windows, and a part of her hoped she had the wrong house, that this guy hadn’t found a new victim already.

  The back door opened, and a little girl in a pink dress peeked outside, halfway hanging on the door handle. “Who are you?” she asked as she looked Yolanda over.

  “I’m Sheriff Yolanda, and who might you be?” She took a step closer, but the child didn’t seem to like that and partly closed the door, peeking out through a small slit.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said, obviously a bit scared of this unfamiliar lady standing in her back yard.

  “That’s absolutely correct. You shouldn’t speak to strangers, so I’ll be on my way now, but just before I go, can I ask you a couple of questions? I promise not to come any closer.”

  “Well... I don’t know. Maybe?” The little girl was hesitant.

  Yolanda decided to just give it a try and hope the child would follow her lead. “Do you live here with your mommy and daddy?”

  “Yes. Daddy is at work but Mommy went to the store to get some apple juice since we were out. She said she would only be a minute, and I was watching Dora the Explorer so I didn’t want to go with her.”

  “Dora the Explorer is such a clever little girl, don’t you think?” Yolanda smiled toward the little girl. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  “I love Dora. She’s my favorite.” Her enthusiasm over the cartoon character caused her to open the door a bit more, swinging it back and forth as she spoke. “I’m Lily, and my little brother is David. He’s not here, though; Mom took him with her to the store because he’s only a baby,” she replied, pride at the title of big sister shining through. Yolanda’s heart took an extra beat at hearing the little girl’s name, but she knew this was not the house they were looking for, and she’d better get going before the mom came back with a multitude of uncomfortable questions. She ended the conversation on a polite note, bid the girl farewell, and slowly backed away before turning around to leave.

  Back in the car, a look at their
route showed the next closest house a few streets away. They were in luck, as the owner was just coming home from a walk, or a ride, as he was bound to a wheelchair. A smiling nurse pushed him toward his porch and up the wooden ramp that had likely been added to the premises after he took ill.

  “Not this one, I guess,” Solomon said and drove on. “Of the eight we’ve already visited, how many did we manage to rule out?”

  “Only five, and we’ve already spent close to four hours on this.” She replied, feeling her heart sink as she did. They still had way too many names to go through, and time was running out. She needed to figure out a way to either pick up the pace or limit the number of places they needed to investigate. She wasn’t sure what she would do, but she was going to discuss it in the morning when Detective Matthews arrived. A fresh set of eyes often brought a new perspective.

  “Have the bureau boys gotten here yet?” A man in his early forties had just arrived, holding a big brown box in his hands, with a laptop case swinging nonchalantly over one shoulder.

  “No, they haven’t. I take it you’re Detective Rick Matthews?” Yolanda responded, barely looking up from the documents on her table. It was only seven-thirty in the morning, and she had come in early to get some work done before the others showed up.

  The man nodded, approaching her and placing the box momentarily on the corner of her desk while balancing it with his knee and offering her his hand. “Just call me Rick. These are the files I mentioned on the phone.” He patted the carton in question on the side, while simultaneously shaking the sheriff’s hand. “Where would you like them?”

  Yolanda had wrangled a desk from storage, some Scandinavian monstrosity, and placed it next to Tyne’s. She pointed it out to the new arrival. “You can use that desk. I’m sorry we don’t have any of those fancy standing ones that you can move up and down and to the sides and what-not, but I hope it will suffice.”

  “Of course, what do you take me for? Some city clown?” He laughed. “I was raised in the country, on a farm. I just moved to the city after graduating from the academy.”

  She realized that his presence made her comfortable. His whole demeanor was somehow extremely friendly and nonchalant, reminding her of Joshua and the reason she had fallen for him. Not that she had such feelings for the detective, but it was nice to be around something familiar during an investigation like this.

  “What happened with the interview you spoke about? The one with the boy?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. Well, Carmen spoke to him, and after a round of her thumbscrews, she got the boy to admit to having been smoking marijuana at the time of the abduction, claiming that’s why he was reluctant to talk about it.” He hesitated, “One thing that still bothers me, though, is that she said he wasn’t ashamed of the smoking, he just didn’t want to tell us because it was none of our business.”

  “Yeah, that sounds a bit aggressive.”

  “Back then, I wondered if I'd be booking this kid for something else later on, but he’s already twenty-one so I guess he’d have done something bad by now.” He shrugged.

  “Well, either that or he has never gotten caught,” she added. “So, to get you up to speed, what we’ve been doing is going over the list of cancer patients, putting effort into narrowing it down as they were just about eight hundred when we began.”

  “And what criteria do you guys use to narrow it down?”

  “We mostly use what Lily has described herself, not putting too much stock into what he has told her, as that could easily be lies. From all that, we’ve approximated the age of the perpetrator and excluded any building that we know for sure doesn’t have a basement.” She showed him their list with the exclusions crossed out. “Tyne’s going over the medical reports, excluding everybody who was diagnosed this year, as our information indicates that he was extremely agitated during Christmas, and we suspect that’s when he either found out he’s terminal or was diagnosed.”

  “But can you be sure of that?” He sounded skeptical on that point.

  “No, we can’t really be sure of anything, but we need to narrow down that list as much as we can, as we have reason to believe he’s planning on killing her.” She knew she probably came off as overly severe, but she needed him to either be on board with their plan or give her a great counter argument for doing things differently.

  “I gotcha,” he replied. Walking over to the stacks of notebooks. “These are all her writings, then?”

  “Yes, those are the books that got the case going.”

  He flipped through one and noticed the fingerprint dust. “Good job with dusting them. I thought you guys didn’t think about such things.” He winked at her.

  “What do you take me for? Some country clown?” She winked back. “I got some detective training back in the day, and while I didn’t know early on if dusting them was necessary, I felt it better to be safe than sorry.” She smiled.

  “Damn right!” He was reading something and seemed a little distracted. “Oh god, this is terrible. Jeez, I feel like everything that happened to her is my fault. I should have found her when she went missing.” He looked up from the book, his eyes showing a genuine display of emotion.

  “You did everything you could, and what’s most important is that we find her now, so put your detective thinking cap on and tell me how we can do this whole thing faster. Our list is way too long as it is.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’m sure when the FBI gets here, they’ll just start raiding houses, so if there’s a cellar, they’ll find it. But it’s still going to take them some time. How about triangulating the patients’ phones and seeing which one of them was in Washington at that time?”

  “It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it works, since people change numbers all the time and some numbers might even have belonged to somebody else back then. Then we can’t even be sure the guy had his phone with him on this trip.” She didn’t mean to be negative, but they didn’t have time to waste on dead ends.

  “Yeah, you’re right. It’s a shame, because I have the perfect guy for the job. Our tech guy might come off as a slice of pie short of a picnic, but he is just amazing when it comes to these things. Do you think our perp has a history?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure. The worst scumbags don’t get caught before they’ve already managed to do way too much damage.” Her mind wandered to the terrible case she had read about in Europe where a man had trapped his daughter in the cellar for over decade, repeatedly raping her, resulting in them having seven children together. It was only when the daughter’s eldest child fell ill and needed to be hospitalized that she broke free, or she would have remained in captivity forever.

  “I’ve got it!” He jumped to his feet and started digging into the files he had brought along. “I remember, there was this kid, this autistic kid who said he had seen... wait...” He flipped eagerly through some papers, putting one folder to the side and picking up another one. “Here it is. A boy named Jasper said he saw a red jeep drive by his house. He was looking out the living room window, doing math with the license plate numbers when he saw it, but it drove too fast for him to be able to get more than two numbers from the car’s plates. 74 was what he remembered. We had already run that against our DC licenses, but if the guy’s from here, no wonder we didn’t find him.”

  “Can your tech guy maybe run that against our list?”

  “He sure can—just give me a second and I’ll call him!”

  “Oh, hi,” Tyne called out from the entrance, wasting no time in going directly to the detective to introduce herself. “I’m happy to see you’re settling in nicely.”

  “Thank you. Are you the lovely lady who organized the notebooks? I’ve been going through your notes, and they’ve been extremely helpful in getting me up to speed without having to read through everything.” He pointed at the wad of notes that had unmistakably been written by a woman, as they were meticulously systematized and color-coded.

  “Yes, that would be me. I f
inished going through the medical reports last night and have managed to exclude fifty-three more from the list.”

  “That brings us down to…?”

  “Around two hundred and fifty,” she replied, her face making it abundantly clear that there were still too many names.

  “Okay, that’s great. You’ve done a good job. If we manage to exclude that number every day, we’ll have found him before the weekend.” He smiled.

  Yolanda listened to their conversation and enjoyed hearing him encourage the young woman. It was often hard to get praise in the workplace, even though few things were as important for maintaining good morale. She could very well envision working alongside Detective Matthews and was sure their collaboration would be both pleasant and effective.

  His phone rang and he excused himself to take the call, walking out of earshot. Solomon wasn’t in yet, but that wasn’t unusual. He was one of those guys who showed up late but worked until even later. She didn’t worry about it too much, as he was a very valuable and reliable member of the team, and often when he wasn’t there before noon, he’d end up bringing in some dramatic revelation that would crack cases wide open, adding in a pecan pie to smooth things over.

  “We’ve got a problem.” Matthews was back from his phone call and evidently unhappy with results of the conversation.

  “What? What’s going on?” Yolanda was surprised at his tone, and she saw that Tyne had moved closer, wanting to get the news the instant it was available.

  “That was Eddie on the phone—”

  “Eddie?” she interjected.

  “Yeah, Eddie the tech guy I told you about, from the station.”