Janice is Missing

by Rod Kackley

  Amanda could barely hold on to her smartphone as Joy shrieked, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  What Jimmy was doing was beating the afternoon rush hour traffic by driving on the sidewalk. Kids walking home from school scattered as the Chevy Cruze shot in a straight line down the cement sidewalk, its tires digging up chunks of lawn sod, as Jimmy looked for a break in the traffic so he could get back on the road.

  In the meantime, Jimmy Mack was having the time of his life.

  “Crystal Avenue! Turn here!” Amanda yelled from the back seat. She had saved the beginnings of her story and was now on MapQuest.

  “Which way?” Jimmy asked as he drove the Chevy over a rose bush and back down on to South DeVos Avenue.

  “That way!”

  “Which way? Right, left, what the fuck do you want?”

  “Right!” Joy and Amanda yelled out together. “Right!”

  Jimmy turned right and immediately hit the brakes.

  Amanda and Joy probably would've been killed if it wasn’t for their seat belts.

  “Good God, Jimmy,” Joy said. “What now?”

  “There it is,” Jimmy said, pointing out the windshield.

  Amanda checked her MapQuest app. It was the correct address. And the house looked like the one in the Google photo.

  “That’s the house," she concluded.

  Jimmy grunted as he checked to be sure his trusty, old .38 caliber snub-nosed department-issued revolver was ready.

  Even though Joy and Amanda were willing to go and go now, Jimmy was all about taking his time.

  The house wasn't going anywhere, and if there was anyone inside they would stay put too. Or if they did leave, Jimmy knew he, Joy, and Amanda couldn't miss them. There was a backyard, but behind that was a ravine.

  Anyone leaving would have to come right at them. If it was the women, that would be fine. They would run into his arms, Jimmy was confident of that. But if there was a serial killer inside, maybe two; God only knew what might happen next.

  Jimmy didn’t want to get too close, too fast. There were no cars in the driveway, nothing outside or inside the 1950s era one-story brick ranch house that gave Jimmy any indication of trouble ahead. But he had learned a long time ago when he was a rookie on the St. Isidore P. D. that a cop can never be too sure.

  He had also learned that a cop should never go into anything like this without backup.

  Yet, here he was. Jimmy was going to have to depend not only on two women, but two civilian woman, who didn’t have a gun between them and had probably never even held a gun.

  “Well,” Jimmy muttered to himself as he looked at Joy and Amanda easing themselves out of the Chevy, “I guess they’ll have to do.”

  Twenty Eight

  It was empty. Not a damn thing or a fucking person inside the house to show the team of Joy, Amanda, and Jimmy Mack that it had never been used for anything that wouldn’t have been normal for a high school teacher’s home in St. Isidore.

  They found the MacBook Air in a bedroom that might or might not have been used to send out the photos of Allie and Janice, who might or might not have been held here.

  But the Photo Booth app was wiped clean, and there was no evidence that anything had been emailed out. In fact, the MacBook’s history was wiped clean. Totally erased. That was strange, but not highly unusual in an age when everyone was worried about cyber security.

  “And he is a teacher,” Amanda pointed out. “A lot of them just wipe out everything so tests and grades can’t be messed with or copied.”

  Jimmy didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. The women on his little team might have thought there was nothing out of place, but Jimmy knew differently.

  The bed was made like the sheets and blankets had been snapped in place by a military man. There wasn’t a book out of place on any of the shelves. The bathroom was crystal clean.

  “Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “There’s dirt on the carpet. It’s not just a smudge or a spot. Look. I am not sure what it is, but there’s a pattern.”

  Jimmy got down on the floor and crawled on his hands and knees following the trail. Amanda and Joy shrugged their shoulders, and although they stayed on their feet, they followed their police dog, kind of a human version of a large, lumbering St. Bernard without the tongue wag, down a hallway and into the kitchen.

  Jimmy got back on his feet, with a little help from Amanda and Joy. His face was flushed, beet red, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.

  He pointed down at the floor. Amanda and Joy looked around his bulk.

  It was a bare footprint.

  “Oh my God,” said Amanda, “here’s another, and another.”

  The footprints hadn’t shown up on the carpet of the bedroom or the hallway, but there were outlined perfectly on the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

  One set of feet was bigger than the other, and there were also some prints left by a couple of people, again one larger than the other, who were wearing shoes.

  “Look where they come from,” Joy said, pointing to a wooden door.

  “The basement,” said Amanda. “Can we go down there without a warrant?

  "

  Jimmy snorted.

  “Warrant? We don’t need no stinking warrant.”

  Amanda looked to Joy for guidance.

  Joy shrugged. She was used to men talking in movie script lines even at times of severe stress. Had to be a gender thing.

  “We’ve come this far. Let’s keep going," Joy said.

  “After you,” said Amanda to Jimmy Mack as she opened the door. “You’re the one with the gun.”

  Jimmy took the lead, thinking again that no cop in his right mind would be walking into a basement that only had one entrance and exit without at least a partner holding a gun watching his back.

  Of all the stupid things he had done as a police officer, and Jimmy Mack had done plenty that would fall into that category, this might be the worse.

  He had no idea who might be in the basement. It seemed like the women who were here, who had sent Amanda those pictures, had escaped. They weren’t upstairs, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be down here.

  So what was Jimmy after?

  He wanted an arrest. Jimmy wanted the rat bastard who had done the damage to the women in the photos. He not only wanted to capture the puke, but Jimmy also wanted to hurt him the way cops had beaten the bad guys in the old days.

  Yeah, we dealt out our own brand of justice, Jimmy thought. And nobody cared as long as the streets were safe. At least that is the way it was in the old days.

  Well, it’s time for some old-school justice to rain down on this motherfucker, Jimmy decided. Just like old times. Just like the good times.

  Besides this wasn’t just a guy who had kidnapped and raped two women. This was a maniac who had been killing girls for at least the past twenty years. Maybe longer.

  Jimmy was as sure of it as he was certain he would take a massive dump when he and the women were back at HQ.

  " I know this SOB, this Tim Sheldon, is the one I have been after all these years," he muttered. "Tim Sheldon has to be the guy who killed all of those girls and boys and hung them out to be found in St. Isidore Park’s forest."

  Amanda looked back at Joy and slightly mouthed, "Is he talking to us?"

  Jimmy was at least as nervous as he had ever been in a situation like this. Probably more so, because Jimmy knew a madman like this would fight to get away like an ugly man with nothing left to lose.

  But that was okay. Jimmy could fight like an ugly man too. And he was ready. After what the doctor told Jimmy a couple of weeks ago, he really didn’t have anything to lose either.

  Jimmy pulled out his gun. It was an old .38-caliber snub nose, the same weapon he’d been issued the day he walked out of the state’s policy academy as a rookie in the St. Isidore Police Department.

  The new class of rookies, when St. Isidore could afford to hire an officer or two, always laughed at him on the gun range. Jimm
y would just smile and wait for their automatics, .45s or 9 mm pistols, to jam.

  The old .38 never failed him, or at least it never had. Jimmy was hoping it wouldn’t let him down this time, either.

  Jimmy took the lead. He nodded at Amanda to open the basement door, and down he went, both hands on his gun, taking one step at a time.

  Amanda and Joy looked at each other and winced every time a step creaked or moaned and groaned under Jimmy’s weight. The women were holding hands. They were scared to death.

  Who could blame them? A couple of civilians who might in minutes come face-to-face with a serial killer, or worse yet, a serial killer with his partner. But that isn’t what really scared the women who were hoping to become St. Isidore and even the world’s most famous investigative reporters.

  Jimmy wasn’t crazy about confronting a couple of serial killers either. And, as much as he wanted to close dozens of cold-case investigations, he was kicking himself for passing up a pretty attractive early retirement package that had been dangled before his middle-aged eyes a couple of months ago.

  Still, he had arrested murders. That was one thing Jimmy was excellent at. He could take a homicide case and solve it, if it could be solved, within 48 hours.

  But what Jimmy always had trouble dealing with was the same thing that bothered him, Joy and Amanda as they moved slowly down the basement steps into Tim Sheldon’s dungeon: the victims.

  Jimmy could barely bring himself to speak to the surviving family members beyond asking the questions that needed to be answered to move the investigation forward. And as for the dead bodies; forget about it.

  They talked to Jimmy. They each had a story to tell. He could handle that on the scene of murder, but later that night, the conversations could continue. The big reason Jimmy was so motivated to solve homicides as quickly as possible was the victims. Until the case was resolved they just wouldn’t shut up.

  The teenage girls who had died in St. Isidore Park had been talking to him every night for decades. One way or another, Jimmy was ready to let them, and himself, rest in peace.

  Neither Joy nor Amanda had ever seen a dead body. They knew Janice and Allie existed, or least they were alive at one point. Joy and Amanda knew both women were kidnapped and spent days, weeks, or even months as prisoners and sex slaves in this basement.

  But suddenly, they were nowhere to be found. Where could Janice and Allie be? Did they run? Maybe they couldn’t wait. Or maybe they were killed? And there was a chance, a possibility, that this was all a scam by Janice to get some publicity for her sex website.

  From the smell alone, Joy and Amanda were convinced they would find two dead bodies in the basement. More stairs were creaking. Jimmy was moving forward.

  Joy and Amanda looked at each other, then down at Jimmy and saw that he was ready to flip a light switch.

  In a second, it would be settled.

  They would find Janice or Allie, dead or alive.

  Joy wasn't sure which she preferred. She just wanted it to be over.

  Twenty Nine

  Joy and Amanda were not unaccustomed to disappointment. Joy especially had a long history of rejection.

  But they were both feeling as deflated as last week’s birthday balloons and Jimmy wasn’t doing much better.

  The basement turned out to be as empty as the rest of the house. Other than a worktable littered with what looked like half-finished toy repair projects, some bricks and rocks in a small pile in the corner, and some taped-up pipes dripping water on the basement’s dirt floor, there was nothing.

  “This is the worst, the absolute worst,” Amanda said, leaning up against the work table, then springing off of it when she realized a spider was working its way up her bare arm.

  “Get it off me! Amanda screamed, shooting Joy a look that if it wasn’t intended to kill, it was at the very least meant to bore a hole in her supervisor’s forehead.

  Joy was beyond depressed.

  “I just wanted this story to be wrapped up,” Joy said more to herself than to anyone else in the basement living or dead.

  She looked so miserable that Amanda not only took pity on her, she took Joy into her arms and held her head against her shoulder.

  “I’ll admit it,” Joy said into Amanda’s neck. “My only motivation for doing this, besides the goal of bringing closure to the victims’ families, was to make a name for myself.”

  Amanda hugged her tighter and patted Joy's back.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy said.

  He slid his .38 into the holster behind his back.

  “Every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end,” Joy said for the second time in her life, or maybe the third. She had told the same thing to Amanda and the interns as they were laying out a strategy for their investigation. “We are going to need three acts.”

  “Now the third act had yet to be written,” wept Joy who knew they were not going to be able to move on until it was finished.

  Jimmy wouldn’t either. The man to whom early retirement was looking more attractive than ever, felt no better than Joy.

  “Listen to me you two,” he said. “You are right. This is not over. It is far from over. But this what we call, ‘life,’ okay?”

  Joy felt like she should say something or relinquish her role as leader.

  Jimmy just shot her a look that showed her who had really been in charge since they had piled into the Chronicle news car.

  “Think about what we know, or think we know,” he said putting the thick forefinger from his right hand on to its counterpart on his left hand.

  “First, we do know that Janice and Allie were kidnapped...”

  “Do we really?” Amanda interjected. “Or do we just think we know that?”

  “Yeah,” said Joy. “You mentioned it as a possibility yourself when we came down the stairs.What if this was all a scam set up by Janice to pump up the clicks for her website’s sex show?”

  “Exactly,” Amanda said. “We know there was a second girl on the show, someone whose name started with “A.”

  Jimmy just looked at the youngest member of their team, raised his eyebrows, and without saying a word reminded Amanda how her first named was spelled.

  She took a step back, as Joy took two steps forward.

  Jimmy held up his hand.

  “Okay, let’s say that is possible,” he admitted. “But how probable is it? We have seen the photos. Did those women look like they were running a scam? Did we see some real injuries?”

  Joy, who had taken a step back, took Amanda’s hand and pulled her protege up beside her.

  “And let’s think about the history here,” Jimmy continued. “Do we believe, or better put, do we know that teenage girls, young women, and even some boys have been killed and hung out on display in the forest?”

  “So let’s forget about the idea that it could be a scam,” said Joy with renewed confidence. "We talked to the families of those other girls and women. We felt like there was enough evidence to come here, to get downstairs, armed and ready. That evidence has not vanished just because Janice and Allie are not here.”

  Amanda nodded her head in agreement, looked at Joy with the beginning of a smile on her face, and screamed.

  A spider, probably the biggest and hairiest the young woman had ever seen had dropped between her and Joy, who echoed her cry.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Jimmy yelled as he took two steps back and one to the side before he fell over a metal bucket.

  “Goddamnit, you two,” Jimmy said as he begun the Herculean task of picking his bulk up off the dirt floor.

  “Look at this,” Joy said.

  She showed her teammates the inside of the bucket.

  “It’s a bucket, so what?” Jimmy said as he tried to brush the dirt and muck off his pants.

  “Yeah, it’s a bucket,” Joy said. “But think about it. What’s wrong with this bucket?”

  “It’s clean,” said Amanda.

  “Correct, it’s clean!
” Joy yelled, pointing at her protege.

  “Why would a bucket in this pig stye be so fucking clean?” Jimmy said.

  “Someone must have washed it, right?” Amanda said.

  “Correct again,” Joy said. “But why?”

  Jimmy took the bucket from Joy. Well, fuck me, he thought. She’s right. Someone has washed it out, but why?

  “Here’s why,” Jimmy said, finally after turning the bucket around a few times. “Look at the outside. Right here.”

  He pointed to a word written on the outside of the silver metal bucket, clean on the inside, dirty on the outside.

  Joy and Amanda leaned forward.

  Jimmy brushed more dirt off the outside of the bucket and walked to a bare light bulb that was swinging from the ceiling.

  He pointed again to the word.

  “Toilet,” Joy and Amanda said together.

  “Evidence,” said Jimmy.

  “Now we know someone was here,” said Amanda.

  “And now we understand why it was cleaned on the outside,” Joy said. “Someone was trying to wipe out all traces of the woman or women who were kept here.”

  “Bingo!” shouted Jimmy. “Now you can all yourselves ‘investigators.’”

  Amanda and Joy pumped the first into the air in celebration.

  “But we need more than one piece of evidence,” Jimmy said. “We have to find more or at least be sure there isn’t anything we are missing.”

  Amanda and Joy set to work with a fury. Neither woman gave a thought to the dirt, muck, beetles or even spiders that came with a search of what was known in St. Isidore as a Michigan basement.

  They were back on track.

  “Here!” shouted Amanda.

  She had discovered a piece of cloth that might or might not have come from clothing. It was brown with a red stripe.

  “Fuck!” Joy screamed.

  She had found the best evidence yet. She found a piece of brown cloth, with the word ‘Fred’s’ written in red piping.

  “Janice worked at Fred’s,” Amanda whispered.

  “She must have been here,” Joy said.

  “Keep looking, there has to be more,” Jimmy said.