by L. T. Ryan
I watched Sartini pour the drinks. It was hard for me not to put the blame on him, but doing so would get us nowhere.
He limped back over, doled out the drinks and sat back down in his chair.
“Your injury,” I said. “You got it on this case, didn’t you?”
Sartini stared into his glass and nodded. After a hefty swig of whisky, he looked up at us.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “This guy you know as O’Connell, we know him as Novak. He assaulted a young woman in a Savannah graveyard ten years ago. Made the mistake of leaving her for dead when she wasn’t. Because of her, they were able to bring him in and he confessed to six more murders.”
“How?” Sartini asked. “This guy was impossible to take down.”
“He gave up the details to save his life. They were threatening the death penalty. It was a matter of time, though. The crime scenes indicated he’d started to get sloppy.”
“Like most serial killers do,” Sartini said.
“Right.”
Sartini set his drink down and interlaced his fingers behind his head. He was focused on the image of Novak. “And the son of a bitch is free again. Where?”
“Savannah, Georgia.” I leaned back and looked Sartini in the eye. “Things didn’t go right all those years ago and more people died. A few weeks back, things didn’t go right, and Novak escaped prison. Now he’s holding someone prisoner who is very dear to me. I need you to do your best work yet and get me the license plate of that van.”
Sartini emptied the contents of his glass into his mouth, bit down, then blew ninety-proof air out. This was what we’d come for. He’d cleaned up the shot of Novak. Now it was time for the big reveal. The pay off. The license plate.
Frame by frame the video played. I tried to tell him that it was still a few minutes away. Sartini didn’t care. He said haste might’ve contributed to missing a vital clue years ago. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I was relieved to see he was taking this so hard. We all make mistakes in this line of work. Over so many years, it’s bound to happen. Any chance at redemption was welcomed.
“She’s in the van, isn’t she,” he said.
“Yup,” I said.
“When did you get the tape?”
“About two hours after they’d been there.”
He shook his head. “Can’t imagine how you felt, being so close behind. This was in Savannah?”
“About thirty miles away. You familiar with the area?”
“We used to vacation down there. Was years ago, though. Those memories probably aren’t much help now.”
“He had the van parked in the woods nearby. Used her car to get there. We assume he drugged or beat her, threw her in the van, then left. He’d made the mistake of not gassing up ahead of time, so he stopped at the first place they came across.”
Sartini looked up at the wall. “Don’t think he might’ve known the clerk?”
“Anything’s possible, I guess. But you saw the tape. Wasn’t much interaction between them.”
“Wouldn’t be if the guy knew what was going on.”
“That’s an interesting angle,” Sam said. “We should follow up on it.”
“One of the detectives down there said he knew the clerk was into some things and mentioned he might go rattle his cage to see if he’d make a mistake.”
“That’s a good move.” Sartini set his attention back on the tape. We had reached the point where the van had begun moving.
“And we’re off,” Sam said.
The license plate came into view. Sartini let the tape run one frame at a time until it was out of sight. Then he ran through it backward and forward again. He was looking for the best shot, the one he deemed most likely to produce a crisp view on cleanup.
He selected his frame, dragged the mouse around to create a square around the van, then removed it from the program. He pasted the picture into another program, blew it up, and began enhancing the pixels. Every so often he’d return the image to its regular size.
“Wait,” Sam said. “Leave it there for a moment.”
Sartini looked up at him. “What?”
Sam leaned in. A wave of bourbon blew past me. He pointed at the single window on the back door of the van. “You see that?”
Now I leaned in. The three of us were ear to ear staring at a faint outline in a tinted window.
“That’s Cassie.” Sam glanced over at me, a relieved smile on his face. “She’s still alive.”
“Well, she was earlier,” I said.
“Think about it, Mitch. If the plan was to kill her, he’d have done it in the woods and thrown the body in the van to get rid of it elsewhere. He wouldn’t run the risk of her lashing out or breaking free unless he wanted her to arrive alive.”
I didn’t share his enthusiasm, but it was a fair point.
“The license plate is still shit,” Sartini said.
While the van had come into clear focus, the sequence of numbers and letters on the plate were blurry and pixelated.
“Can you get it any clearer?” I asked.
Sartini waved me off. He put the photo through the process again. We all held our breath as he started the final rendering and then shrunk the screen.
The air left the room. Out of seven characters, only the first and fifth were remotely discernible.
Chapter Fifty-Three
We moved the car to the end of Sartini’s street. Sam got out and I sat in silence. A light breeze blew in through the open windows, filling the car with the scents of early fall. Soon enough the ground would be littered with dead leaves and the smell of smoke would linger throughout the day. But for now, it was still warm out.
What was it like where Cassie was? Was she near the city or the coast? Or had they pressed west? Maybe Novak had travelled into South Carolina. Was it possible he’d come back here?
I doubted the last option right away. He hadn’t been in this area in fifteen years. Things had changed. Any support network he had back then had most likely been put through the ringer by the detectives working the case. If Novak showed up, he’d hang, and he knew it.
The murders had occurred in Savannah. Several of his previous murders had taken place in and around Savannah. He’d abducted Cassie in Savannah. Call it intuition, gut instinct, or simply looking at and digesting the obvious facts, but I knew he was somewhere near Savannah.
Sartini said he’d continue to work on the license plate. He could try other still frames, and even send it off to the one guy who was better than him. Mostly because the other guy had the best equipment, and it wasn’t worth Sartini upgrading, because according to him, he had one foot, both nuts, and an ass cheek in the grave already. I didn’t want to know what all that meant, so I simply gave him my blessing to do anything and everything in his power to decipher that license plate. It was all we had.
Sam’s cell phone screen streaked past the open window as he shoved it in his pocket. I’d caught bits and pieces of his conversation with his NSA contact, but had been too far into my own head to pay much attention. He dropped into the driver’s seat. The car dipped noticeably to his side.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Still working on it. They’re one hundred percent certain the call originated from the Savannah area. Now they’re trying to trace it to the device it originated from. Since it’s a spoof number, it could’ve been done on a computer or another cell phone.”
“It’s a start,” I said. “That’s better than what we had before.”
“Don’t let the license plate thing get you down. We’re gonna figure this out and get her back.”
“We?”
He nodded. “I’m coming down to help you.”
“Pennington and Cervantes are gonna love that.”
“Screw them. Cassie’s my friend, too. Yeah, I know she weirds me out sometimes, but the lady has grown on me. Any extra help should be welcome as far as I’m concerned.”
I stared out the window at a couple jogging to
ward us. The guy spotted us and placed himself between the car and his wife. He stared us down as they trotted past.
“We better get out of here,” Sam said. “That guy’s a threat to call the cops.”
He navigated back to the highway. I went back and forth on whether it would be a good idea for Sam to come down. I know I’d asked him earlier, but I hadn’t thought it through then. The situation evolved by the minute. Would he help or hamper? I considered several of the cases we had worked, and one thing stood out. I probably wouldn’t have solved seventy-five percent of them if he hadn’t been my partner.
“All right, maybe it is a good idea to have you down there with me.”
“I knew you’d see it my way.” Sam hugged the centerline tight on a sharp curve.
“But we need to be on separate flights. Someone’s gonna be watching out for me. I don’t want you mixed up in it if they try to take me down.”
“All the more reason for us to get on the flight together.”
I raised my hand, but Sam shut me down quick.
“Mitch, listen. They know you. What makes you think they know about me?”
“Shouldn’t take too much Googling to figure out we work together. All the spotter needs is a picture of you and you’re done, too.”
“Then they’ll see me anyway.” He turned into a Hardee’s parking lot. It was the only fast food I could stand. “Mitch, we’re taking the same flight. You’ll do everything fifty feet ahead of me. Once they spot you, they’ll stop looking elsewhere.”
I conceded the point to him. We weren’t talking about a trained Special Forces guy on lookout. Whoever would be waiting would be antsy. “That’ll work, I suppose. Unless they’re just watching the manifests.”
Sam shrugged. “I got ways around that.”
“Mr. NSA?”
“Miss.” He winked. The water was becoming less murky.
“So how long’s this been going on?” I asked.
Sam raised an eyebrow and changed his tone. “Hey, why don’t we stop by your mom’s place and surprise Ella?”
“Changing the subject?”
“It’s only about ten minutes away.” He picked up his phone and swiped away the lock screen. “I’ll give her a call so she’s got the coffee ready when we get there.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll stop talking about Miss NSA if you put that phone down. You know how much trouble I’ll be in if they find out I’ve been in town all day?”
“Who’ll give it to you worse?”
“Ella, no doubt.” At one time I would’ve said Momma, but the little girl had grown into her own recently and had a forked tongue, just like her grandmother.
“Wanna crash at my place?”
Sam’s house was closer than mine. But something was tugging at me. Pulling me back to Savannah.
“Let’s get to the airport and redeye our way down.”
Sam sighed while rubbing his temples. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
Neither of us knew how right we were.
Chapter Fifty-Four
My rental car sat in the middle of the parking lot. I could see it underneath the bright lights from inside the airport. And so could anyone else. Had Pennington and Cervantes put eyes on it, watching since I left? I had no doubt they knew I was back. I half-wished one of them would pull up so I could give them the good, the bad, and the interesting news I’d learned back home.
But that would take time I didn’t necessarily have.
Sam’s flight landed about an hour ahead of mine. In the end, we decided it was best he go first so he could act as lookout for me. I texted him the moment the wheels hit the ground for an update. Since then he’d messaged back every three minutes. Same text every time.
No activity.
Maybe Pennington and Cervantes didn’t know I was back. Hell, what if they had made progress with the investigation and had Novak in custody? The thought tugged at the strings of my emotions, and I nearly dialed Pennington’s number. That would lead to questions from them. I wasn’t ready for that. Plus, it was still early.
I spotted Sam standing outside the terminal, trying to blend in with the arriving tourists and business people catching their early flights. Sam fit in with neither group. The hard look on his face told anyone who eyed him that they’d be better off picking a fight with a crocodile. At least then their punishment would be quick.
I stepped outside into the thick air and walked right past Sam. He took off about the same time, heading straight across the road. A few minutes later I picked him up on the other side of the lot at the exit, beyond the reach of most security cameras.
“Good flight?” he asked.
I stirred what was left of my coffee with the sludge at the bottom of the cup and finished it off. “Nothing special. Managed to sleep for a bit.”
“Not me, man,” he said. “Whole time I was thinking about Cassie. Almost felt like she was talking to me. Know what I mean?”
I most certainly did. “That’s happened to me a few times, too. It’s like she’s reaching out and playing inside my mind. I wonder, is it really happening, or is it just stress catching up to me?”
“Felt pretty damn real to me.”
I eyed him as I merged onto the highway. “What’d you see?”
“See?” He tipped his head back against the headrest. “Don’t know if it was as much seeing as feeling restricted both physically and mentally. My limbs tied down. My mind overwhelmed. I’ve told you about how those bastards waterboarded me when I was captured in Afghanistan. I felt like that again. And then, I was free.”
Did it mean she’d found freedom in passing to the next life? Were we too late? Did we ever have a chance?
“I can see those wheels turning, Mitch.” Sam placed his hand on the dash. “Don’t read too much into it. I was somewhere between sleep and meditation when it happened. Probably just my imagination.”
“I’ve had it happ—”
“Stop right there. Look, don’t you think if she was dead, she’d find a way to lead us to her body? I mean, if all this shit that’s happened with her is real and we aren’t just mass-hallucinating every time she tips us off on a case.”
I might have settled for that at the moment. “Maybe she did and you can’t remember. Hey, we’ll get you one of those regression things. Get some hypnotist to pull the memory out of you.”
“I’m afraid of what else they might dig up.”
“Can’t be any worse than all the other shit I know about you.”
Sam laughed and turned toward the window, leading to the death of the conversation. For the next several minutes we were quiet with our thoughts as I drove to the crash site. I’d only been there and back. The ride out was a blur, but coming home I’d managed to memorize the route.
There was no sign from the road that anything had happened in the woods. They didn’t want anyone stopping and performing their own investigation. I drove a few hundred yards past the billboard and pulled over. We sat there for a few minutes with the windows rolled down, watching to see how much traffic drove by. There was none. By the time we exited, Sam had a slick layer of sweat on his forehead.
“This isn’t going to bode well for me.” He unbuttoned his pullover and spread the collar as wide as it’d go.
“It gets plenty hot and humid back home,” I said.
“Not like this. Not this time of the year.”
I glanced up at thick gray clouds gathering overhead. “We might want to hurry this up.”
He pointed at the billboard. “The hell is holding that cow up?”
“More of a mystery than half the cases we worked.”
We followed the trail through the woods until we reached the clearing.
“That’s where the accident happened.” I pointed at a section along the wood’s edge where a small tree was bent over, and the grass had been crushed after having a car sit on it for a couple of days.
“I
t was Cassie’s car?” Sam said.
“Yeah, and I know she was in it.”
“How’s that?”
“Found a bracelet inside.”
“She could have left it in there anytime.”
“She had it on the night before.” I stopped and waited for him to turn back toward me. “And I mean late the night before.”
Sam wagged his index finger in front of me. “You and Cassie?”
I shrugged. “Something like that. Don’t want to make too much of it. The detectives don’t know the details.”
He nodded silently before turning back to the accident scene. I hung back while he walked the perimeter. It was best to let him form his own opinions and see things through impartial eyes. Maybe he’d spot something none of us had. Sam spent ten minutes walking from spot to spot, kneeling, spreading the grass and looking at the dirt. In the end he found nothing substantial.
“What happened after the crash?” he asked.
I led him into the woods. Yellow crime scene tape wrapped around several trees fenced the area in. “Maybe they’re still working it?”
Sam stood at the edge with his hands on his hips, staring out over the dried plaster-covered tire tracks. It appeared the forensics team had found footprints as well. He threw one leg then the other over the tape and walked through the scene, stopping a few times but quickly moving on. He exited on the opposite side and walked out of view.
A few minutes later, Sam called out. “Hey, Mitch. Come check this out.”
I didn’t make it five steps before I heard a crack and the lights went out.
Chapter Fifty-Five
He’d been told to stay quiet and remain out of sight. But it was just too damn hard to do. For Christ’s sake, he had needs.
For chrissakes! For chrissakes! For chrissakes!