by Sarah Sutton
But Tara was still trying to wrap her mind around what had just happened. Warren stood nearby, talking to a local officer before walking back over to her. She felt ashamed and embarrassed that she had let her guard down, and that again she had put them both in harm’s way.
“Thank you,” she uttered when Warren was close enough to hear her.
Those were the only words that came to her mind. He saved her life after all, shooting James in the leg. She would’ve never been able to react quickly enough, and that thought terrified her beyond measure.
“Don’t thank me,” Warren said as he walked past her, toward the front door of the house. “We’re partners. We protect each other.”
Tara followed behind him, wondering why he wasn’t as angry as she thought he would be. But just when Warren was close enough to the door, he turned around to face her, looking her straight in the eyes.
“Don’t you ever put your guard down like that again. Do you understand me?” He waved his finger at his words. “As much as you think you understand a situation, you don’t. A mistake in this job could cost you your life, and all it takes is one split second of misjudgment.”
Tara nodded her head as the shame and horror of the situation flooded through her body, twisting her stomach into an anxious knot. She should’ve known better. He was right.
But just as quickly as Warren reprimanded her, he was opening the door of the house, fully focused on their mission in front of him. By doing so, Tara knew he was sending another message, whether he was aware of it or not. They needed to stay on track, stay focused, and he was going to let this slide. And at that, Tara shifted her focus too.
Warren pushed the door wide open, revealing the mess inside, and it was immediately clear that the man was certainly a hoarder. As they stepped in, Tara scanned the wall for a light switch and flipped it on, making the mess even more visible. They stood in the living room, boxes piled in every which way. Tara bent down and carefully opened one of them, sending a cloud of dust into the air. She coughed uncontrollably.
“How do people live like this?” she asked, as she gained control over her coughing fit.
“I have no idea,” Warren said as he did the same from across the room, reaching into one of the boxes to see what was inside. “What did you find?” he added.
Tara opened the box wide. Inside lay piles of DVDs.
“Just a bunch of DVDs of old movies,” she said as she dug deeper before standing back up. “What about you? Find anything?”
“Nothing interesting.” He pushed a bunch of stuff around in the box he was digging through. “Just some more DVDs and CDs.”
He stood up and moved onto another. Tara did the same, and then moved onto another after that, and another after that—continuously moving around the room, digging through more meaningless objects until Tara finally looked up in surprise.
“I think I found something,” she said as she reached into one of the boxes that contained hundreds of prescription medicine bottles.
She pulled them out, one at a time, holding them up to the light and reading the label—each bottle prescribed to a different person. They had to have been stolen, Tara assumed—something only a drug addict would do. But that would explain James’s odd behavior.
“What is it?” Warren asked as he walked closer. He stopped just over her shoulder.
Tara passed them behind her and Warren read the labels.
“No wonder he was acting odd. They’re almost all empty,” he replied.
They both agreed that it would explain his odd behavior, but it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. None of the names on the bottles were familiar and they continued to move through the room, digging through more and more boxes, each one filled with a large quantity of a single object—baseball cards, books, copper pipes. Tara knew his intent was most likely to sell them, probably in hopes to support his drug problem.
“Come look at this,” Tara suddenly heard from down the hall, which was where Warren had since moved.
Tara followed his voice until she was standing over him in James’s bedroom. The small room was just as claustrophobic as the rest of the house, as boxes flooded into it. Warren sat on his heels on the soiled carpet, his hands deep in a box until he pulled out a bunch of wallets. Tara kneeled down next to him, picking up each one that he placed down on the ground and checking the licenses inside. All random strangers. Warren continued to pull more out, checking the IDs as well, until he stopped moving and continued to study two now in his hands.
“What is it?” Tara asked.
Warren turned around to face her. “Look whose wallets these are.”
He handed the licenses to Tara and she looked down at them—immediately recognizing the faces. They were the first two victims and the ones that the woman at the information center said James gave directions to. Now they knew he had taken their wallets too, but Tara wondered when—if it was at the information center, or if he tracked them down on the trail.
“That’s not all I found,” Warren said, now picking up a camera next to him. “Take a look at this.”
Tara picked it up and flicked through the pictures. It was another victim—Anna—the oldest of the two sisters that just went missing. And Tara remembered now that the youngest had a passion for photography, and probably took the picture. In the image, Anna stood on the trail, looking back at the camera and smiling.
“This must be right before they went missing,” Tara replied.
She passed the camera back to Warren, but Warren’s eyes were locked on something else underneath the bed.
He crawled over to get closer, and Tara could now see that he spotted the edge of an object sticking out from under the bed. He reached for the bed skirt and lifted it up, as Tara moved closer for a better look. Behind it, piled on top of each other, sat dozens of guns of varying types, but something stuck out among them all—a crossbow.
Chapter Twenty Seven
James Hayden sat up slightly, his wrists shackled to the hospital bed and his bandaged leg outstretched in front of him. He stared at the door blankly as Tara and Warren entered the hospital room. It was the same stare he had hours earlier but now his face was pale—drained of blood and energy from the injury he just endured.
For the first time, Tara felt a flutter of excitement, knowing that this man could very well be who they had been looking for all along. However, they still had not found the victims, even after sweeping his property, and Tara wondered where else he could be keeping them. But as she looked at him—his blank stare and bloodshot eyes—there was evidently something odd about him. It was his bizarre unpredictable behavior that made Tara feel that he was the one.
She walked over to the side of his bed, holding an evidence bag in one hand, and stood by him, looking down. Warren did the same.
“That was quite a spectacle you pulled back there,” Tara said.
Warren nodded. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you, you shouldn’t shoot at an officer?” he added.
James’s eyes continued to hold their gaze on the ceiling, his hands now clenched in fists by his side. He didn’t respond, and it was clear he wasn’t planning to, so Tara reached into the evidence bag, pulling out the wallets they found at his house.
“Do you want to tell me why you had these?” Tara asked, holding them out in front of him.
His eyes looked at them cautiously until they locked on what Tara was holding. For a moment a flash of fear crossed his face, until he struggled to sit up a bit straighter and his face morphed into something else completely—it relaxed, as if all the fears he felt left his mind.
“I’ve never seen them before,” he muttered.
His sudden change in behavior caught Tara off guard. She looked at him for a moment, trying hard to study his face—to understand him—but his face was so still, so emotionless. It was as if he almost believed his own words even though both he and Tara knew it was a blatant lie.
“James, they were in your bedroom,” Tara shot back.<
br />
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I don’t know why they were in there,” he said.
He stared Tara dead in the eye without a flicker of doubt.
“Where are they?” Tara asked, growing increasingly impatient as she opened each wallet, pulled out the licenses, and flashed them in front of his face. She was referring to the victims; it was all they needed now—to find them.
He squinted his eyes, taking a hard look at the licenses.
“I’ve never seen those people before,” he replied again before moving his gaze to the ceiling, and Tara caught the corners of his mouth rise slightly as he discreetly tried to hide a smile on his face. This man is a skilled manipulator, and he knows it, Tara thought to herself.
“Okay,” she finally said. “We know you had the wallets. We also found the camera of one of the other victims…”
His eyes darted to her briefly at the mention of the camera, but then he quickly tried hard to not make his interest noticeable and let his eyes fall.
“Now, we could sit here all day until you finally tell us the truth, but this will all go a lot quicker and smoother if you just tell us where the people are that you took these things from,” she said.
“Like I said, I don’t know why those things were in my house.” His voice now shook slightly.
Tara picked the wallet up again. “James, we know you met these people,” she said shaking the wallet in her hand while she spoke. “You were spotted at the info center, speaking with two of them.”
His face turned a deep shade of red.
“Who told you that,” he barked back, as he violently jolted his body forward, like a threatened dog, until his handcuffs clanked the rails of his hospital bed.
Tara ignored his question. “We also know you were at the trail too recently, when two younger girls went missing,” she added. “One of them owned this camera that you happened to have in your home but don’t seem to have any recollection of.”
He clenched his teeth, as his face grew redder. He’s just about to boil over, Tara thought.
“Don’t you see why it’s a bit hard for me to believe that you don’t know anything?” She waited for a response, but one didn’t come. “Did you murder these people?” she finally asked.
“No!” he finally blurted. “I don’t know! I don’t remember!”
“What do you mean you don’t remember?”
“I remember the wallets,” he said, trying to contain his emotion. “I stole them, okay?…At the info center. They put their bags down while they used the bathroom and I just took them.” He then looked up at Tara with watery eyes. “But I honestly don’t even remember taking that camera.”
Tara couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth. He was so unpredictable and she couldn’t quite tell if it was all an act. But there was one more piece of evidence she needed to show him—she needed to see his reaction—and she reached into the evidence bag one last time, grabbing hold of a compass.
“Does this look familiar to you?” she asked.
He looked up and studied what Tara held.
“No, I’ve never seen that before,” he said with a furrowed brow as he gained composure and wiped a tear from under his eye. “I don’t think I have.”
Tara rolled her eyes. “James, you better have something more to say than you don’t remember, or we’re going to sit here all night,” she said, now raising her voice.
“I swear!” he yelled. “Something’s wrong with me!” His voice was now shaking uncontrollably as he tried to maintain his composure.
“What do you mean something’s wrong with you?” Tara asked.
“I can’t remember anything,” he added with his eyes tightly shut as he shook his head. He started to sob uncontrollably.
“So what you’re telling me is that you aren’t sure if you killed these people?”
James looked up at the ceiling, his body now shaking with each sob until he opened his mouth to speak.
“I don’t know what I’m capable of,” he added before the weight of his words sank in, pushing him into an uncontrollable cry.
***
Tara and Warren stepped out into the hallway of the hospital. But just when the door closed, their eyes darted down the hall to where Sheriff Brady was briskly walking toward them with a short, middle-aged man that Tara had never seen before.
“So, how did it go?” she asked, when close enough.
She stood in front of them with an unwavering smile, revealing that she knew something that they didn’t yet. She quickly introduced them to the man standing next to her—the station’s psychiatrist.
Tara knew that the sheriff wanted James Hayden to be who they have been looking for all along. She wanted this to be over, as did Tara, and while James Hayden didn’t deny the allegations, Tara couldn’t help but wonder if he really did only steal the wallets and the camera, and all the other objects they found collected in his home. When he finally admitted to stealing, it was the first time Tara saw a flicker of genuineness as if he were telling the truth.
“Well,” Tara began, “he didn’t admit it, but he didn’t deny it either.”
Warren nodded. “There’s a good possibility it’s him though,” he chimed in. “Don’t you agree?” he asked Tara.
“Well, I—” Tara began, but she still wasn’t quite sure.
She needed more evidence to feel confident saying that she too knew it was him. The sheriff could sense Tara’s flicker of doubt and before she could even finish saying that she wasn’t too sure, Sheriff Brady spoke.
“My officers dug through that box of pills you found,” she began. “It looks like he was prescribed anti-psychotics.” She continued to explain that they had found bottles with his name on the labels. One of them, prescribed a couple weeks ago, had barely been touched, leading them to believe he wasn’t taking them.
“Would that cause a lapse in memory?” Tara asked, curious if maybe he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t remember.
Brady looked toward the psychiatrist who then shrugged.
“Not necessarily,” he confirmed. “But if he was taking any of the narcotics that were found in that box, that could potentially cause a lapse in memory, especially while withdrawing from anti-psychotics.”
Tara shared a quick glance with Warren. It certainly explained the lapse in memory, leading Tara to believe that maybe he wasn’t lying after all.
“Maybe he was telling the truth then,” Tara added.
But the sheriff just shook her head, before reiterating that he had a possible murder weapon and the victims’ belongings. They had enough to convict him.
“His DNA was all over the wallet and camera and crossbow,” she added and then leaned in a bit closer. “Plus, I just spoke to forensics. Turns out the crossbow found in his home wasn’t the same brand as the arrow found in the victim, but she said it’s possible that the crossbow could’ve been used to shoot it based on the angle and speed at which the victim was hit.”
Warren looked over at Tara wide-eyed and she could see him growing more certain that James Hayden was their man. It shocked Tara too, and she was sure now that they had enough to convict him. But there was still a doubt that lingered in Tara’s mind because without bodies, there was nothing definitive to prove that he was one hundred percent the killer.
“But we didn’t find any compasses or the bodies,” Tara replied.
It was one thing that stuck out to her. The killer had to have had more compasses and where else would he have hidden them if they weren’t in his home? And where were the bodies?
“We don’t necessarily need to,” Warren answered.
He admitted that having both would certainly help, but they did have enough evidence at this point.
“It would be quite a coincidence that he had all those objects and a potential murder weapon.” He turned to Tara fully. “Plus, he said it himself that he doesn’t even know if he killed them. No one in their right mind would say that if they were innocent.”
<
br /> Warren was convinced. It was a certainty Tara hadn’t seen from him before. She wanted that same feeling to reflect onto her, but as much as she tried to see how Warren and Brady were so certain, her doubt wouldn’t subside. And, after Sheriff Brady and the psychiatrist said their goodbyes and departed, Tara couldn’t help but speak again.
“I’m just not so convinced,” she finally admitted to Warren.
But Warren was already reaching for his phone, and Tara knew he wanted to tell Reinhardt. She had almost forgotten the twenty-four hours he had given them.
“It’s him, Mills. Trust me on this one,” he insisted, as he allowed his finger to dial Reinhardt without hesitation.
At his words, Tara suddenly questioned herself. After all, Warren had been doing this a lot longer than she, and she wondered if maybe she should trust him—maybe he was right after all. Maybe she was getting too ahead of herself. She stifled her feelings.
Warren lifted his phone to his ear and walked down the hall into a private room as Tara followed. Moments later, Reinhardt was on speaker and Warren had already filled him in. Warren’s face was beaming.
“Excellent work, both of you,” Reinhardt finally replied.
It was clear that he too thought this case was over, and while it was evident that Reinhardt’s doubts in Tara were now far gone, Tara still felt an uneasiness in her gut. She wanted to relish this moment, but there was a part of her that wouldn’t allow her to. As much as she wanted to trust their judgment and reactions, each time she tried to stifle her own, it only seemed to churn in her belly with even more force. It was a fear that they were pinning something on an innocent man, just because it all seemed plausible.
“You two make an excellent team,” Reinhardt added, before mentioning that he would arrange a flight for their trip home tomorrow, and Tara’s stomach churned even harder.
The phone conversation ended and Tara and Warren stood alone. There was a silence between them before Warren patted her on the back.