A Trace of Crime

by Blake Pierce

  Ranchers sometimes used them on their cows to get them to go in the direction they wanted. She remembered Mr. Hensarling saying that it gave a cow a jolt but that a cattle prod would do much worse to a human being.

  Now that the initial terror and exhaustion had worn off, Jessica realized something else: she was hungry. She hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since lunch. And whatever time it was now, she was sure it was late.

  But no one had come by to offer food or even check to see if she was still alive. She hadn’t heard anything other than her own voice and the occasional rattle of the pipes since she’d arrived.

  Have I just been left here to die? Will I ever see my family again? Will I ever even learn who did this to me?

  Just then, the light above her burned out completely. Too tired and hoarse to scream, she pressed her back against the pipe as if it could offer her some kind of protection.

  After a few seconds, a hum kicked in and a dull blue emergency light came on in the far corner of the room. Her eyes slowly started to adjust to the half-darkness and she noticed something in the same corner where the light emanated from. She squinted, in the vain hope that could somehow help. Eventually the form came into focus and she realized that it had the shape of a human.

  “Hello,” she called out excitedly. “You in the corner—can you hear me?”

  There was no response. She looked a little closer and realized there was something odd about the figure, lying limply on its side. It looked human but somehow different. She was perplexed. And then, in a flash of recognition, she realized what she was looking at. It was a human skeleton.

  Jessica Rainey discovered that she could still scream after all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Even though she didn’t really feel it, Keri pretended to stay calm and collected for the sake of her passenger.

  Tim Rainey was so shell-shocked that she had to drive him home in his own car. Ray said he wanted to check on some leads at the station so Manny Suarez followed her and picked her up to drive her back.

  On the way, she tried to tell Rainey that there was still hope, that they still had lots of leads to follow. But she could tell he wasn’t really listening and stopped trying after a few minutes. When they got to his house, he got out of the car and closed the door behind him without saying a word.

  Back at the station, Keri was surprised to find there was very little in the way of investigative activity. That was until she remembered that it was after 1 a.m. and there wasn’t much more that could be done until morning.

  “How’s Rainey doing?” Hillman asked when he saw Keri and Manny walk in.

  “Not great,” Keri admitted. “He was equal parts pissed and stunned. I’d expect it to tip more toward pissed by morning. Do we know what gave us away? How the hell did this guy know we were there?”

  “I’m reviewing the footage from the scene,” Edgerton said. “So far, I can’t find any errors on our part.”

  Hillman sighed heavily. He’d seen a lot of these situations and Keri noticed that he wasn’t as quick to place blame as usual.

  “Folks, we may not have done anything wrong at all. This guy has clearly been planning this for a long time. It’s reasonable to think he prepared for this contingency as well.”

  “It’s like Keri mentioned to me earlier,” Ray added. “He gave us a lot of lead time on the drop area. It’s possible he had already set up cameras in the area or at the Rainey house. If he was testing them to see if they’d call us, it wouldn’t have been hard to discover they had.”

  Keri appreciated that even though he was upset with her, Ray was willing to acknowledge that her misgivings hadn’t been misplaced.

  “I’m just worried we might not get another chance,” Manny said. “He may not want to risk another attempt.”

  Keri was tempted to remind them about her doubts that the kidnapper ever intended to show up but decided now wasn’t the time.

  “What happened with the motorcyclist?” she asked instead.

  “Nothing,” came a voice from the couch in the corner. Keri looked over and saw that it was Frank Brody, sprawled out lazily.

  “Can you be a bit more specific?” she asked, trying to keep her tone non-confrontational. She hadn’t even realized he had been part of the operation.

  “He was just some joyriding teenager. We pulled him over a few blocks away. We checked and he has no record other than two speeding tickets for the same sort of thing. He goes to high school in Venice—no obvious connection to the girl or anything else in the area.”

  Garrett Patterson, who had remained back at the station to help with coordination, cleared his throat.

  “If you got something to say, Patterson, just spit it out,” growled Brody. “This isn’t a finishing school.”

  For once Keri agreed with him. Patterson was great at sifting through data but his reticence to go in the field or even speak up in meetings was getting tiresome. Patterson swallowed hard and spoke.

  “I was just going to say that we traced the phone that texted Mr. Rainey. It was a burner. Its last GPS location was in the marina, not too far from the park. We think it was dumped in the ocean after it was used.”

  “What I want to know is how this guy even had Rainey’s cell number,” Ray wondered. “I checked his phone. His contact list is small and he doesn’t make many calls. You can tell that he’s very careful, what with working on so much proprietary stuff at that gaming company. He’s not just handing out his number to everyone.”

  “It’s a fair question,” Hillman said. “But considering how much time this guy’s put into his plan, I can’t say I’m shocked that he got his hands on it somehow. Here’s my question. Is there anything else we can do here tonight or are we just spinning our wheels?”

  “The case parameters I put into the federal missing persons database are being collated,” Edgerton said. “We’ll be able to look for similar cases in a few hours. That’s around the time the day shifts for other local police departments on the East Coast and in the Midwest will be getting in. They’ll see our alert then. Maybe someone will recognize a pattern and reach out. But other than that, I can’t think of anything we should be doing.”

  “Anyone else?” Hillman asked. When no one spoke up, he continued. “Then everyone go home. Get a few hours’ sleep. Be back here bright and early. Hopefully something will have popped by then.”

  As Keri turned to leave, she glanced up at one of the television monitors in the corner of the bullpen.

  “Oh no,” she groaned.

  Everyone else looked up and saw what had upset her. The screen was showing a local news alert about Jessica Rainey’s disappearance. Keri didn’t have to hear what the reporter was saying to know this was a frustrating development. The woman was standing in front of the Raineys’ house and the banner at the bottom of the screen read: “Local girl taken near her home.”

  “Get a couple more black-and-whites out there now!” Hillman barked to the desk sergeant. “I want a perimeter around the house and the neighborhood closed off. When the news directors balk, tell them it’s an active crime scene. No one but residents are allowed on that block without clearance. Reporters will have to do their stand-ups from down on Pershing. Got it?”

  “Got it, Lieutenant,” the desk sergeant yelled back.

  “And tell the officers on scene that as soon as that live shot ends, they need to escort that TV crew off the block, understood?”

  “Understood, Lieutenant.”

  Hillman looked around and seeing everyone still there, he reminded them, “This doesn’t change anything for all of you. Go home. Sleep. Come back early. See you tomorrow.”

  As if to make his point, he walked straight out of the station without looking back. Ray made a beeline right after him and Keri had to run to try to catch up.

  “Hey, Ray, can we talk for a minute?” she asked as they both stepped out the employee entrance into the chilly night. She hoped their little moment of levity on Butch’s sailboat ha
d opened the door a crack.

  “Listen, Keri. I’m just not up for it right now. I’m exhausted. I’m confused. I don’t want to be pissy but can we just keep things professional for now and say goodbye until the morning?”

  “Sure,” she said, trying to keep her tone from sounding too bruised. “Of course. Sure.”

  She stopped walking and let him cross the parking lot alone. She stood there silently as he got in his car, pulled out, and left the lot. He never even glanced her way.

  Unsure what to do, she walked slowly to her own car, a used Honda Civic Hybrid that had replaced her used Toyota Prius, which was destroyed when the man abducting Evie had smashed into her head-on. She closed the door and rested her head on the steering wheel.

  She knew there wasn’t anything else she could do for Jessica Rainey in the next few hours. Anything she tried would be the investigative equivalent of grinding metal on metal. But she also knew she was too wired to go home and sleep.

  She imagined Tim and Carolyn Rainey lying in bed, eyes wide open, horrifying thoughts pinballing around in their heads. Mr. Rainey would have almost certainly gone out to confront the reporter invading their privacy. That’s what she would have done, partly out of anger, partly just to have something to do. She hoped the officers stationed outside their house stopped him. That would only make things worse.

  Stuck in their house, they would obsess over every little detail of the day, wondering what they might have done differently, what they might have missed. It was what she did every day. It was why she pored over the surveillance footage of the Black Widower executing the man who had been holding Evie and shoving her in the trunk of his car.

  Keri yanked her head up off the wheel so suddenly that she almost pulled a muscle in her neck. She had just had what some folks might call a moment of clarity.

  There’s one detail I haven’t checked out. And now is as good a time as any to do it.

  *

  Keri parked on Sunset Boulevard, about a block away from Brian Wickwire’s Echo Park apartment, and walked the rest of the way. It was still hard to think of him as Brian Wickwire, a man with a name and an apartment and a fridge filled with food.

  For so long she’d only thought of him as the Collector, the monster who abducted her daughter from a park right in front of her; the man who’d killed an innocent teenager who tried to stop him.

  Of course, now he was no longer a threat, after their confrontation around Thanksgiving. It hadn’t gone how she’d hoped. She’d wanted a confession and Evie’s location. But it became quickly clear that he wasn’t going to be sharing that information.

  And then, even after they fought and he was dying from a fall that left blood pouring out of his skull, he’d baited her to the point that she found herself choking what little life remained out of him.

  She’d gone straight to his apartment afterward and found the clue that led to her temporary, painfully short reunion with Evie and the discovery of dozens of other missing children. Now she was hoping that his apartment might hold one more clue, something about the identity or location of the Black Widower.

  Keri knew that there was still a unit from Downtown Division stationed out front of Wickwire’s apartment building, which was why she was dressed in a sweatshirt with an oversized hoodie hiding her face. Apart from herself, several ghoulishly curious true crime fans had tried to break into the home of the infamous Collector to steal some kind of memento.

  Unlike most of those amateurs, Keri had access to the building design and knew that in addition to the front and rear entrances to the building, there was also a door next to the parking garage gate in the alley. It locked automatically and there was no exterior handle so it was supposedly secure.

  But Keri knew that with this door model, an extremely powerful, specially designed magnet could be used to slide the latch back just enough so that it could be opened from the outside. After checking to make sure she was alone in the alley, she did exactly that. It was a trick she’d learned from a thief she’d busted in her days as a patrol officer and this was not the first time it had come in handy.

  After gaining entry, she took the stairs from the garage to Wickwire’s floor. Peeking out into the hallway, she saw it was empty. Anything else would have been surprising at 2 a.m. on a weeknight. As quietly as she could, she made her way down the hall, checking for any new surveillance cameras that might have been installed since her last visit.

  Seeing nothing, she reached his door and quickly jimmied it open, ignoring the police tape plastered across it. Once inside and leaving the lights off, she ignored everything else and moved to the wall behind Wickwire’s desk.

  The photos of animals in nature were still lined up, just as they had been in the photo she’d seen earlier. And there was the black widow picture she had been so desperately hoping to see.

  She stared at it, suddenly nervous to touch it for fear that her suspicions would be dashed and she’d be back at square one, without any leads to follow or clues to study. If this one didn’t bear fruit, she didn’t know what she’d do.

  You don’t have time for this kind of navel gazing. Do what you came here to do.

  Ignoring the nervous tingles running down her spine, Keri reached out using her gloved hands and delicately removed the photo from the wall. She turned it over to look at the back. It was too dark to see if there was any writing or marking.

  Keri looked around and decided to go into the bathroom, which had no exterior windows and couldn’t betray her presence if she turned on the light. She walked in, closed the door, and flipped the switch—nothing. The power must have been turned off.

  No big deal. That’s what cell phone flashlights are for.

  She turned hers on and studied the back of the photo frame closely. But there was nothing unusual about it. It was just standard picture frame backing. Keri slid out the backing to see if anything had been written on the back of the photo itself. There was nothing. Frustrated and without any idea what to do next, she fought the urge to rip the photo to shreds. Instead, she slid it back into place.

  She was about to turn off her flashlight and return the photo to the wall, when she caught a glimpse of something on the floor near her shoe. It was a slip of paper. She might have missed it completely if she’d turned off the light a fraction of a second earlier.

  She picked it up, realizing it must have been placed between the frame backing and the photo itself and fallen out without her noticing. She held the light up to it and saw a phrase written in light pencil: “the truth can be found in the weeds.”

  While she had no idea what it meant, Keri knew the line had been written by Wickwire. She recognized both his handwriting and the way he refused to capitalize any letters, ever. She snapped a photo of the paper and returned it to the frame.

  If anything came of this, she’d want to direct Downtown Division to where they could find the relevant evidence. If she took it with her, it was useless in terms of prosecuting someone down the line, although that seemed like a pipe dream right now.

  She put the photo back on the wall and left the apartment complex the same way she’d entered, avoiding human contact the entire time. She hurried up Sunset to her car and had just opened the door, excited to get in and finally pull off the heavy hoodie, when a car pulled up behind her, parked, and turned off the engine.

  She glanced back, unsettled. There was a ton of available street parking. Why would someone choose to park directly behind her in the middle of the night? The driver turned off the car’s headlights and she immediately knew why. It was the Collector’s lawyer, Jackson Cave.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Keri felt her knees start to buckle and gripped the roof of her car for support. She tried to hide the shock and creeping fear she felt growing inside her.

  What is he doing here? How did he know I would be here at this hour? Had he called the Downtown Division cops?

  All those questions were swimming simultaneously in her head but she forced hersel
f to look nonchalant, as this was the most expected turn of events she’d encountered today.

  Cave got out of his car, a late model Tesla, and closed the door. He was dressed in what Keri imagined was 2 a.m. casual attire for him—slacks with loafers, a turtleneck sweater, and a sport coat. Even at this hour, his slicked-back black hair was immaculate. His perfectly bronzed skin almost glowed under the street lights.

  “Surprised to see me?” he asked as he walked toward her with something between a grin and a sneer on his face, exposing his disturbingly white teeth.

  “Headed to a croquet match?” Keri countered, nodding at his outfit. She’d learned that when dealing with Jackson Cave, any hint of vulnerability was a liability.

  “You’re funny,” he said, not laughing. He came to a stop about six feet from her. His penetrating blue eyes fixed on her and narrowed. “What a coincidence, you and I meeting. After all, my main residence is in the Hollywood Hills and you live in that rundown Playa del Rey apartment above a Chinese restaurant that stinks for miles. And yet, here we both are, right outside Mr. Wickwire’s apartment, in the middle of the night. Strange, don’t you think?”

  “I couldn’t sleep—working a tough case. So I went for a drive, and a walk. What’s your excuse, Cave? Scoping out preschools to troll later this morning?”

  “You are delicious, Detective,” Cave said and this time his smile seemed genuine. “I could spend all night sparring with you. You’re much more fun than most of the lawyers I see in court. Alas, time is short. Shall we speak frankly?”

  “Always.”

  “I’m not very happy about the death of my client, Mr. Wickwire. He…how can I put this? He brought in a lot of business, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Keri said flatly.

  “Well, I feel like you never got your proper comeuppance for that. My understanding is that Mr. Wickwire might have been choked to death even as he was bleeding from the brain. And yet, despite their investigation, Internal Affairs has yet to see fit to charge you with anything.”