Still Waters

by David Banner

  He could barely focus on Kits voice as she told him about the warrant. Even in their darkest and most troubled of times Ryan Devereux couldn’t stand to see the woman he loved upset. A nervous energy resonated from her skin like a cloud across the water.

  “I have to go,” he placed the phone into his pocket. “I have to check out a warrant.”

  “Of course,” she nodded. “See you soon.”

  Chapter 18

  “Police,” Ryan knocked on the door. “Open up.”

  It was a mere formality at this point. Both the detective and his partner knew Jake Johnson wouldn’t be home. He’d altered evidence then likely skipped town. But with a girl missing Ryan needed to try and work through this as fast as possible. Every second she went unaccounted for was a second too long.

  “Last chance,” he said before knocking one final time.

  Outstretching his arm Ryan fired a single bullet into the handle. With a creak and a clang of metal it swung open. Both detectives kept their guns held high in the air as they stepped over the threshold. Ryan studied the room. There were no lights and no sounds.

  Kit quickly flicked a light switch. A dim yellow glow flickered to life above them, casting shadows across the room like ghosts. For as long as he could remember Ryan Devereux hated dim lighting. It had its’ place of course, a swanky late night dinner or boardwalk for example. But a persons home should be bright, he thought.

  A ratty yellow couch sat in the living room. A single end table sat to its far left. Atop it were half-empty long neck bottles and a discarded pack of cigarettes. Thick stale air filled Ryan’s lungs with every step. Jake Jones obviously lived alone, Ryan thought. He couldn’t think of a single woman who would put up with this kind of squalor, at least not any woman worth having.

  “This place is disgusting,” Kit sighed. “What the hell is wrong with people? Open a damn window or something.”

  “Just vacuum the damn floor.” Ryan snapped. “How about that?”

  Kit brushed past him, stepping over a small patch of congealed liquid near the edge of the kitchen floor. Ryan stopped, his eyes focusing in on the linoleum. He hadn’t seen floors like these since he was a kid, he mused. They looked like his mothers.

  “Bedroom.” Kit pointed to a narrow door near the end of the hallway.

  Following closely behind her Ryan approached the door. Like the rest of Jake Johnsons apartment it hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time. Running stains and a thick layer of dirt covered the wood in splotchy masses, most near the floor. Ryan cringed at the sight.

  “Last chance,” Kit slid a latex glove over her hand and knocked on the door.

  She was met with only silence as she slowly turned the handle. Ryan held his breath as he stepped through the door, expecting the bedroom to be even more dank than the rest of the home. Atop the bed lay a mess of old blankets and a few pillows. They, like every other thing in the apartment, were worn and tattered.

  After taking a quick survey of the room Ryan began sorting through a tall drawer pressed tightly against the wall. Just a few moments in something bright red caught the detectives attention. Carefully and with gloved hands he lifted it into the air.

  “Pretty sexy panties for a guy.” Kit said.

  Ryan placed the sexy lace underwear atop the dresser and continued looking. For the most part he found nothing interesting or of note. Old socks, a few pairs of jeans and some t-shirts made up the vast majority of the mans wardrobe.

  He closed the drawer, then with a sigh and a little hesitation Ryan dropped to his knees and began looking under the bed. He removed a large shallow trunk, lifted it to the bed and popped it open. He found it unsurprisingly stacked with pornography. Titles like ‘eighteen and ready’ and ‘Daddy’s little girl’ accounted for most of the material.

  Any adult that claimed not to watch pornography would have been lying, it was a simple fact. Still though, something about the near-inappropriate titles he looked at rubbed the detective the wrong way. But, he thought, they aren’t illegal.

  Leaving the still-open trunk on the bed Ryan nodded toward a second door just across the hallway. Kit lead the way, carefully stepping over a pair of what had to be unwashed underwear crumpled into a ball on the floor.

  “It’s locked,” she jiggled the handle.

  Ryan gave a quick nod in response as she raised her gun and shot through the door. Stepping inside the detectives heart sank. A video camera sat atop a tripod in the middle of the room facing a small futon. Ryan felt his pulse began to race.

  “There,” his partner motioned toward a series of video monitors along the wall. It was a large setup with several keyboards and ten separate screens. “A lot of surveillance for such a small place. Though something tells me that’s not all that goes on in here.”

  The detective stepped closer and one by one powered on all of the monitors. In the beginning they showed things like stairwells and views of the parking lot but then, after getting to the seventh screen things took a darker turn.

  Ryan’s heart sank as he stared into the small black and white screen. He recognized her immediately. Long black hair framed her young face and a Rolling Stones t-shirt clung tightly to her body as she lay in bed mindlessly flicking through her phone. Both he and his partner had spoken with the young girl only days before.

  “He’s spying on her…” Kit said, quickly turning on the remaining screens. “He’s spying on all of them. Even-“

  “Holly,” Ryan answered. “That’s her apartment.”

  “What about that?” She pointed to a small white projector. “It’s plugged in.”

  He stepped closer to the small device and pressed play. Bright white light emitted from the lens, casting a moving image on an empty white wall behind them. Ryan quickly spun on his heels and focused in. I know that face… he thought.

  A homemade pornography video starring none other than Jake Jones himself began playing. His partner was a young light-haired woman with large breasts and a nose ring. A single tattoo reading the words ‘Nobody’s baby’ ran the length of her leg.

  The sex was slow in the beginning, almost easy in a way but it didn’t last. The woman’s screams echoed through the small room as Jake Jones began forcing her body closer and closer toward its’ breaking point. A look of torment and anger washed over her face.

  “We need to get forensics down here. They have to sort through all of this video.” Kit powered off the projector.

  “The girl,” he answered.

  “Yeah,” Kit sighed. “I recognize her.”

  Minutes later the small apartment complex was overrun with police officers, CSI teams and enough reporters to send any sane man running fast in the opposite direction. This was bad, Ryan thought. The Holly Waters case would soon blow up and he would feel the pressure.

  Chapter 19

  “Man,” Kit said as they drove away. “That’s a damn circus.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan sighed. “Glad to be away from it.”

  “Do you still think Gus had something to do with this?” Kit asked. “Even after seeing all of that?”

  “Don’t know,” he answered. “Jones is a creep for sure and he’ll end up in jail but I want to keep after this thing until we know. We need to speak with this girl anyway. Might as well do it now.”

  Daphne Kyser was the soon to be wife of Gus Greenfield and so far the detectives knew very little about the woman. There was however, a Youtube video of the night Gus Greenfield proposed to her. It seemed one of the woman’s best friends helped the man plan his surprise and decided to record the entire thing.

  Ryan watched the video on repeat probably ten times the previous night, each time focusing in on Gus’s face. He seemed happy, the detective thought. He seemed like a man who knew what he was getting himself into. He dropped to his knee and asked those three magic words. All around him people smiled and cheered when the young woman’s eyes began to flow with tears. Gus lifted her into the air and spun her around as though they were the only
two people seeing it. It was a sweet thing, one that reminded the detective of his own proposal all of those years ago.

  A few short minutes later Ryan’s cruiser stopped just outside the woman’s house. The place was an old quintessentially southern place with a large wraparound porch and a rusted out water pump in the front yard. Ryan stopped, his eyes focusing in on the well-manicured lawn and the small makeshift flowerbed surrounding the old pump.

  It was perfect, he thought. The perfect place to live, to love and to raise a family. Large rust streaks cut through the metal roofs chipped red paint helping to give the place an aesthetically pleasing old world charm.

  The sound of crunching gravel billowed out from beneath the soles of his shoes as he headed for the door. She appeared almost instantly, a long white sundress catching the morning light as she smiled at the detectives. While not overtly sexual in appearance the woman was beautiful.

  “Hello,” Ryan began. “I’m detective Ryan Devereux and this is my partner Kit Walker. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your fiancé.”

  “Gus,” she wrinkled her brow. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “We don’t know,” Kit chimed in. “We’re having a bit of trouble locating him.”

  “Please,” she waved her hand. “Come in.”

  Old photographs depicting a smiling soldier hung proudly on the woman’s walls. He was tall and thin, with an angular face and a mop of bushy dark hair. His clothes were a little too big and his helmet didn’t exactly fit though none of that seemed to matter to him.

  “Is that your father?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes,” she turned to the larger of the photographs. “That’s him. Reggie Kyser.”

  “Looks like he enjoyed being a soldier.”

  “Until the day he died,” she answered. “Used to talk about it all the time.”

  Her movements were careful, calculated and graceful. To the detective it was obvious the woman came from good breeding, the kind that cares about things like finishing school and cotillions. She smiled again, offering the detectives a glass of tea before reappearing with a large ornate pitcher and three glasses. Large thin sliced lemon wedges floated near the top of the icy pitcher, infusing the homemade sweet tea with a bright citrus kick. It was just the way Ryan liked it.

  “Thank you,” he placed the glass against his lips.

  In a place like Charleston, and especially for a young woman like this, sweet tea could be almost an art form. Maybe it was an outdated thing or maybe it never mattered in the first place but for many southerners entertaining someone in their home was cause for taking things serious.

  “This is delicious,” Ryan was sure to tell her. “Thank you.”

  “Yes,” Kit echoed, taking a large gulp from her glass. “Perfect.”

  She was lying of course. Being from New Jersey the woman loathed sweet tea. In fact, Ryan couldn’t remember seeing her ever drink tea of any kind. Coffee was the womans drug of choice. Coffee and a nightcap.

  “Can you tell us the last time you heard from Gus?” Kit asked.

  “Yesterday.” She answered. “He called to tell me he wouldn’t be home.”

  The sound of Kit’s ringing phone cut through the room, startling both Ryan and Daphne more than it had any real right to. She lifted the device from her belt and checked the screen before excusing herself back to the wraparound porch.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Ryan shook his head. “Work just never stops.”

  “Of course,” she topped off his glass. “I understand.”

  “Did Gus say why he wouldn’t be home?”

  “He was spending the night with his father,” she answered.

  “And what about the funeral?” Ryan asked. “Did he mention that to you?”

  “Funeral…” she repeated, her eyes searching the empty air. “No, I don’t know anything about a funeral. Has someone passed?”

  There were two ways to look at the woman’s response. The first being that Gus Greenfield didn’t tell his fiancé about the funeral because he knew she would have tried to accompany him for emotional support. The second being that something wasn’t right, that the funeral was just a rouse to get Holly Waters out of town. Either way, the guy was a dick for lying to such a seemingly lovely woman only to have an affair.

  “Does the name Holly Waters mean anything to you?” Ryan asked.

  The young womans bright smiled deflated as she sank back into her perfectly overstuffed couch. It was enough to tell the detective everything he needed to know. Daphne’s sky-blue eyes cut away as she tried to hold back her emotions and maintain her composure.

  “He isn’t perfect,” she began. “And we’ve had our problems but we’re trying to work through them.”

  “What can you tell me about her relationship with your fiancé?”

  She took a long minute to reply, keeping her eyes focused on her fathers picture. Infidelity is a painful thing, one that leaves a trail of destruction and heartache in its wake. People become broken, just shells of themselves if they allow it to cut too deep. And from the looks of things Ryan knew Daphne Kyser’s wounds weren’t the kind to heal quickly.

  “I don’t know how it started.” She answered. “I know it had been going on for a few months before I realized. But then a couple of nights ago she came here. She parked outside of my house and refused to leave until Gus came out there to talk with her. She said she was pregnant with his baby.”

  “When you say a couple of nights ago?” Ryan asked.

  “I think it was Tuesday… last Tuesday.”

  “And do you know if the baby was Gus’s?”

  “He swore she wasn’t pregnant, that she was lying.” Tears slowly fell from her kind blue eyes. “She gave him a pregnancy test. It was positive but he didn’t see her take it and she wouldn’t take another one. I don’t know if she is or not…”

  “And you say Gus went to visit his father? What can you tell me about him?”

  “I’ve only met him once. After that I… he made a pass at me, or at least I think he did. I didn’t like him, I didn’t like the way he looked at me. I told Gus I didn’t want to see him again. That’s why he didn’t ask me to go up there I’m sure.”

  And suddenly a third option came into play, Ryan thought. Maybe Gus Greenfield did want emotional support for the funeral but knew he couldn’t ask his fiancé to accompany him. Perhaps that’s why he brought Holly along.

  “Would it surprise you to know that Gus took Holly Waters along with him to the funeral?”

  “What funeral?”

  “Gus’s uncle.” Ryan clarified. “Just before leaving Holly informed her mother that she and Gus were headed to a funeral for his uncle and that they would be staying with his father.”

  “Gus would never do that,” she answered. “He would never stay with his father. Especially not with a girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, his father made a pass at me and when I told Gus about it he didn’t seem surprised. He said it happened all the time and that he wouldn’t bring girls around his father. Besides, they couldn’t be in the same room together for more than a few minutes without it devolving into a screaming match. There’s no way Gus would spend the night there.”

  “And his uncle?” Ryan asked. “You haven’t heard anything about him?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “We found Jake Jones,” Kit stepped back into the room. “An officer picked him up at a gas station on the way to Savannah. Looks like he saw the news reports and tried to skip town. They’re bringing him in now.”

  “Would you mind if we picked this up another time?” Ryan asked.

  “Of course,” the tearful woman replied. “Thank you.”

  Chapter 20

  “The first thing we found,” the forensics officer began. “Was the missing footage from the tapes he provided you earlier. Holly Waters door was barely visible in the corner of another camera, looks like he forgot to erase that footage. Though there are
large chunks of video missing from nearly every file. The footage from the night of Holly’s disappearance is also gone. There is nothing to show the parking lot or any of the camera’s facing her apartment until late the next evening.”

  “What did you see?” Ryan asked.

  “It appears Mr. Jones entered Ms. Waters apartment roughly ten minutes after she and Gus Greenfield exited the premises. Once inside he stayed a total of twenty seven minutes before leaving. As of yet we haven’t been able to find any interior surveillance during that time. It looks like he may have disabled the interior camera before going in. What we do know is that he exited the apartment carrying what looked to be a small red article of clothing.”

  In addition to being a voyeur Jake Jones was now a thief, it seemed. The thought of violating someones privacy in such a way angered the detective to no end. Sure, he’d been on stakeouts and surveillance missions before but those were very different things. Those, he always reminded himself, were legal and with good cause. This was just a creepy asshole being a creepy asshole.

  “We’ve located several pairs of women’s underwear and a few other items, one of which we believe to be the article from the video. Once we have Ms. Waters DNA we will check it against the items to verify whether or not it in fact belonged to her.”

  “Alright…” Ryan answered, taking a quick look at the footage before heading into the interrogation room to meet with Jake Jones.

  The room was cold, with the kind of crisp yet still air only found in places like police stations. Slate grey walls climbed ten foot high, framed by soundproofing tiles and a large two way mirror. A large circular LED light hung high atop the small metal table where Mr. Jones sat with his hands cuffed.

  This was the first time Ryan had stepped into the interrogation room since its recent refurbishment. While he found the chiefs improvement request strange at the time Ryan now knew the reasons behind it.

  This was his swan song in a way, all the requests for better equipment, new cars and more up to date weaponry, It was all because he knew he was leaving. Even with their troubled past the thought of his absence felt strange for the detective. It was almost wrong in a way.