by Sara Clancy
“Be good, angel. And if you can’t be good, be lucky.”
“I’m going to go and potentially ruin my life now.”
“Let me know how it goes,” he grinned with a wave.
After an exchanging of endearments and a final warning to be discreet, Nicole ended the call. Running her tongue over her bottom lip, she looked around the office once again. Nothing stirred. The world beyond the door was silent minus the random crackle of the radio. She made sure that the computer’s screen wasn’t visible from the door, took a deep breath, and then quickly used her mother’s password to log into the police database.
“Well, that is one crime down,” she mumbled to herself.
She had hoped that the fidgeting nerves under her skin would settle down once she had taken the first step. Like passing the threshold of no return would allow her to commit fully to the insane task she had set herself. It usually worked like that. But the nerves remained. Scampering within her stomach like a swarm of ants. Before her bravado broke altogether, she hurriedly typed Benton’s name into the search engine.
“How on earth are there thirty-two Benton Bertrands?” she groaned softly.
She had assumed it would be an uncommon enough name, one that would negate her needing to know any other personal information to pick him out of the masses. While she didn’t know his birthday, she could guess at the year, and that knocked a few of them out of consideration. There wasn’t time to check them all. The tip of her tongue tracked restlessly over her lips as she glanced to the door, half expecting to see Chuck or her mother suddenly materializing into the room. Nicole upgraded to nipping painfully on her lip as she scanned the names again.
“Benton Bartholomew Bertrand,” she read aloud in a whisper. “Your parents do seem the type to like alliteration.”
Holding her breath, she clicked on the name, and couldn’t resist the fist-pump of victory when Benton’s picture was displayed on screen alongside a staggering amount of raw information. After a quick check on the door again, Nicole began to scroll through the decades’ worth of police records. It seemed that he had first appeared on the RCMP’s radar when he was ten. And he did it with a bit of dramatic flair. Unoccupied, he had walked into an Ottawa police station and confessed to the murder of his friend.
Delving deeper into the records, she speed read through the transcripts of the confession. Despite Benton being able to recite a damning amount of information, there were a few things missing. Like the actual location of the crime scene, a motive of any kind, and an actual victim. Nicole leaned in closer to the screen as she reread the last part. The victim in question, Steve Howell, had been found alive and well only an hour later, sitting at his normal classroom desk, with no idea what Benton was talking about. It had been decided that the whole incident was nothing more than a vivid nightmare by a very sensitive little boy. The file had been amended three days later when Steve had gone missing.
It took a week for them to find the body. When they had, his tiny frame had held the exact wounds Benton had described. Nicole clicked on the links that led her to the crime scene photographs and autopsy report. She wished she hadn’t. Even prepared, a single glance was enough to make her stomach roll. The boy looked more like a heap of discarded scraps than a child. She instantly shut the newly opened windows and went back to the safety of the detached words of the reports.
Nicole quickly scrolled through the records, hoping that the bold black lettering would somehow replace the images that were now burnt into her mind. The murder had been part of a horrific series. One child a month, for eight months. None of the victims had reached their teens and they ran through a spectrum of physical descriptions. But there were two similarities that connected all of the children. Every one of them had lived within the same four block radius, and Benton had visited them all, days before their abduction. There were a few notes scattered under these incidences indicating that there had been a few reports of complaints and a few petitions for restraining orders.
In each case, Benton insisted that everything he knew had come from a dream. Nicole could see how scared parents wouldn’t accept that as an appropriate explanation. The reports of units responding to disturbances involving Benton and his family steadily increased as suspicions grew. Everyone had come to the conclusion that Benton knew far more than he was letting on. Accusations were made that he himself was the killer and when that didn’t pan out, people looked towards his parents. And then any relative or friend or general acquaintance that Benton would feel the need to protect. They all assumed that he knew who the killer was.
Nicole could already understand where this combination of fear and hysteria was likely to lead long before she read the correct passage. Ten year-old Benton had been found beaten behind a bowling alley. She hadn’t wanted to read those reports. It was easier to imagine what they had done to him without having to know, or see. But she steeled herself and opened the links. The ice in her stomach grew with every blatant word, every photograph that documented the evidence. Benton had been tiny for his age. His wiry little frame looked far too small to even withstand all the damage that had been inflicted upon him. Internal bleeding, massive blood loss, a concussion so devastating that he needed a metal plate to replace a segment of his skull, the inventory of injuries seemed to have no end. She clasped one hand over her now aching throat as she read about how they had found flakes of yellow embedded into the bone just behind his right ear. For a while, they had thought it had been left by the weapon used in the assault. The forensics team concluded that the substance was actually the outer coating for a pencil he must have had tucked behind his ear when the attack started. Nicole’s eyes burned as she stared at the photographs.
“How hard would you have to hit a child to grind a pencil into his bone?” she wondered aloud.
Suddenly drained, she rubbed her hands over her face. No matter how hard she pushed her palm into her eyes, the haunting images remained. With a deep breath and a painful swallow, she forced herself to continue. The injuries had caused massive swelling to his brain and the doctors had no choice but to put him into a medically induced coma. It had taken almost two weeks for Benton to stabilize. His parents had been out for blood, but Benton had refused to cooperate. The investigating officer once again believed that Benton was protecting someone, and this time they might have actually been right. Through the course of the investigation, the substantial list of suspects was narrowed down until only the group of children Benton had been at the bowling alley with, remained. Still, Benton kept his silence. And without him, the general public were all too ready to blame the killer whom they still believed Benton to be entwined with. The officer hadn’t been able to press charges. Both the killings and Benton’s attack remain unsolved.
What followed from there was a long list of suspicion and death that crisscrossed the country. It didn’t matter where the Bertrands moved, it always ended the same. A murderer stalking the streets and Benton in the midst of it. Always speaking of his dreams, but never really believed. Sitting in an office that was filled with hundreds of pleasant memories, Nicole read about things more disgusting and twisted than she could have ever conjured up on her own. The brief and efficient language did its part to ease the blow. But nothing could spare her of the horror that poured from the screen. She felt unclean in every sense of the word by the time she reached the end of the file and an attachment to Oliver Ackerman’s case.
Her thought process once again rounded back to the weathered paint that had been hidden within the barn wall. It niggled at her, probing and prodding at her that this meant something. Something important. The decision to move had barely finished crossing her mind when she leaped up and began her search through the files on her mother’s desk. Dorothy was still working the Ackerman case. The file should be there, complete with hardcopies of the crime scene photographs and any conclusions they had reached.
Under a file about two farmers having a dispute over the height of a dividing hedge, Nicol
e found what she was looking for. Rolling her chair back to the other side where the desk lamp waited, she flipped open the file and scanned through the sheets. The symbol had barely warranted a mention. The symbol had been noted as ‘graffiti of unknown purpose.’ Nicole knew her mother well enough to know that she was intrigued, but not actively trying to make any sense of it. Her focus was on Mr. Ackerman’s body, the cause of his death, and tracking down any surviving family members who might be able to shed some light on the event.
Repositioning the light, Nicole got her first real look at the symbol. There was something about the circles and curves, the layout and spacing, which looked vaguely familiar. She couldn’t place the where or why of it, but that little voice that told her this was important, was growing louder.
Making sure she logged out of the database, Nicole pulled up a new Skype call and deliberately kept from looking at the time. She was horrible at lying under direct questioning. She knew it. Almost everyone else did too. It made plausible deniability a must in these kinds of situations. The call connected and a very unhappy Professor Lester filled the screen. It looked like he hadn’t fully woken up yet as he roughly pushed his slightly long hair from his face. It had just begun to gray around the temple, only noticeable due to how dark the rest of his hair was. He also scrubbed his face vigorously before groaning out an annoyed greeting.
“Hi, Professor.”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Honestly, no,” she said.
He groaned again. “If this is about another book report–”
“I got an A+ on the last one,” she cut in happily. “Well, the teacher wanted to just give me an A, but once I told her that you were my reference she couldn’t argue with the facts. Thanks again for your help.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he flopped his free hand about. “Well, that’s exactly why I completed the long, painful and expensive journey to be a professor at a respectable college. To help high schoolers with their history teachers.”
“I wouldn’t word it quite like that,” she mumbled. “Did you get the ‘thank-you’ cookies I sent?”
He lost his emerging anger with a reluctant sigh. “Yes. Thank you. So, what do you need this time?”
“Why couldn’t I have just called to talk?”
“Far too late for this, Nicole,” he warned.
“My friend found this weird symbol hidden in his barn and I was hoping that you would be able to help me identify it.”
He blinked owlishly at her. “That’s it? That’s what couldn’t wait for the morning?”
“Well, to be perfectly candid, a dead body was found buried under this symbol and I’m admittedly a little freaked out and worried that my mother might not be giving it the significance it needs, since I’m sure that it has something to do with the corpse that you might remember me mentioning earlier in this very long sentence.” She gulped down a need for breath as she waited for his reply.
Professor Lester just stared at her for a long moment. “Why didn’t you just lead with ‘police investigation’?”
“Because I’m not a police officer and, as such, have nothing people would normally consider to be authority. Besides, I don’t really have any evidence that suggests the symbol means anything. It’s more of a feeling.”
“So,” he said slowly, “absolutely no reason to believe that it isn’t a bit of random graffiti that just happened to be there?”
“Not really.”
“In reality, you woke me up for an unsubstantiated hunch.”
“Basically.”
“And you couldn’t wait a few more hours.”
“It was really bothering me.”
He muttered a few words that she took great care not to hear.
“Am I right in assuming that, if I don’t do this, you’re going to engage in your special brand of mild stalking?”
“I will be quite persistent in the matter, yes, sir.”
“Fine. Email it through.” He lifted a hand to cut her off from thanking him. “And let’s keep the calls between office hours in the future.”
“Of course. Thank you!”
He grumbled, nodded and ended the call with a sharp jab. Nicole hurriedly scanned the photograph and sent it off using her private email. She replaced the files and took a few extra minutes to ensure they were in the exact same position she had found them in. Her mother had a sharp eye for detail. Freakishly so. Even the slightest change would have her asking questions. Once that was done, and she had made sure her tracks were covered, the first stages of her plan were officially complete.
“Huh, would have thought committing crimes would have been harder,” she muttered to herself as her panic began to wane. “Why do people make it look so difficult?”
But her nerves came back with a vengeance when it was time to start stage two. Snooping around her mother’s office was one thing. She had done it a few times in the past. All in drastic situations where she had no other choice, of course, but she couldn’t deny that her past actions had been more legal-adjacent than entirely-legal in a proper sense. But stage two would be out of her comfort zone.
What she had learned about Benton, so far, had only filled her with more questions. This whole situation felt like a puzzle and she was missing some key pieces. And the next most obvious place to look for them had to be Benton’s psychiatric records. His parents had secured him a psychiatry session before they had even set foot into town. That was not something most people would do unless they were used to having that kind of care, so she was pretty sure that his past doctors would have already transferred their files and patient notes to Aspen’s office. There would be things in those files that Benton wouldn’t have told anyone else. She needed that information. But breaking into Aspen’s office was a degree of illegal and wrong that she had never even flirted with before.
“You’ve never been attacked by a knife-wielding friend before, either,” she whispered to herself as she strode towards the window.
There was no way Chuck would ever let her leave on her own, which meant any of the normal exits were out of the question. Her bravado crumbled away when she reached the window. It was still dark enough outside that she had to struggle to see past her own reflection. Streetlamps lined the road with a soft orange glow. There wasn’t a single sign of life. No people. No cars. Nothing but a stillness that forced memories of tonight to rush to the forefront of her mind.
“You’re being silly,” she told herself in her best stern voice. “Vic hadn’t even been after you, and the hospital is only two streets away.”
It wasn’t enough of a pep talk to make her ready to leap out, but it did get her to slide open the window. For the first time, she realized just how little security the police station actually had. It was all too easy to slip out of this window and into the street unnoticed. And it wouldn’t be that hard to get back in later. A nagging voice in the back of her mind told her that she should probably remind her mother to lock her office window in the future. But not tonight. Not until she had exploited the opportunity.
Gathering her resolve, Nicole threaded one leg out through the gap. The office was on the ground floor and the bottom of the window was at hip height. It made the crawling out undignified but easy. The cold wind instantly welcomed her and she quickly buttoned up her coat against the chill.
The darkness that had looked intimidating from inside the office became a lot more threatening as it encased her. Each shadow seemed to shift with movement. Each breath of wind sounded like a whispering voice. She felt utterly exposed and turned to climb right back through the still open gap.
“Stop that right now,” she snapped at herself. Reluctantly, she stepped away from the window. Her casual stride turned into a jog, then a full out sprint down the block, her heart hammering within her throat.
I knew Danny and Meg were wrong, she thought. That tone really does work.
Chapter 9
The staircase to the second floor was halfwa
y down a long and annoyingly exposed hallway, with the gift shop at one end and the nurse’s station at the other. A few feet from the bottom stairs was a vending machine that had given Nicole a little bit of cover to creep forward unnoticed. But there was no way she could actually round it to get to the stairs, and consequently Aspen’s office, without being seen.
Leaning heavily against the cool metal side of the vending machine, she peeked around it to check if the coast was clear. There were at least four people milling about the nurse’s station. Apparently, the skeleton staff didn’t have much to occupy their time with tonight because they never seemed all that interested in going anywhere else.
It hadn’t occurred to Nicole until after she had entered the hospital that she would stick out. She knew everyone in town. Anyone who saw here would question why she was here so late. Not to mention that, by now, everyone and their mothers would know what had happened at the diner. Even if she had the world’s most perfectly constructed lie, and managed to execute it flawlessly, word would get back to Dorothy that she had visited. It was the first time in her life that she had actually wished that she didn’t live in a small town.
Minutes dragged on. The nurses chatted, drank their coffee, and while some left to do their rounds, they never left the station unmanned. Do you have to be so damn dedicated? The angry thought was quickly chased by the more reasonable part of her mind that mentioned that dedication in the health industry was a good thing. That reasonable voice was really starting to get irritating. Another minute passed and she knew it wasn’t going to get any better. Either she took her chance or stayed with the ever-increasing risk that someone would walk down the hall behind her.
She snuck another peek, waiting for the right moment when they would all be distracted by whatever it was they were doing. Finally, the opportunity opened up and she took it before she could second-guess herself. The hardest part was to keep her boots from thumping against the tiled floor. She rushed around the vending machine and threw herself into the stairwell. Her knee smacked against the edges of the stairs. The blow sent out a long throb of protest but it wasn’t enough to keep her from scrambling up and pressing herself against the wall. In the shadows of the stairwell, Nicole held her breath and waited for someone to call her name. Once again, it occurred to her much too late that she really should have worked on an excuse. But no one called. No one came. Their conversations and the steady rhythm of clicking computer keys went on, undisturbed.