“Don’t do it, Mr. Varding.”
His shoulders relaxed. Kent had taught Nicole to look to the core for a suspect’s next move. He was going to surrender, and would have if a seventh grader hadn’t burst into the locker room.
Before Nicole could get a clean shot, Mr. Varding grabbed the boy as a hostage, aiming at his head.
Well, this wasn’t going like it was supposed to.
* * *
“Nicole is being shot at!” Joshua exclaimed, yet again. Kent didn’t seem to understand exactly how bad the situation was.
The profiler was staring off into space, a slow smile spreading on his lips.
“Aren’t you going to call for back up?”
Kent gave a vague shake of his head. Was that no or just a muscle spasm?
Okay, Joshua couldn’t let Nicole die on his watch, so he picked up the phone, but Kent covered his hand, preventing Joshua from making the call.
“Intimate offenders need an intimate arrest.”
Joshua was so freaking confused. “What does that mean?”
“The more people there, the harder it will be to bring the suspect in,” Kent explained, which really didn’t explain a whole bunch at all. “Trust me I know.”
Kent held out his hand. “Your phone.”
Finally, the profiler was making sense.
Unfortunately, he didn’t dial 911 or the station, but Nicole’s number.
“What are you doing?” Joshua begged.
In typical fashion, Kent held up a single finger to silence Joshua as the phone rang.
“Nicole. The gym coach is a pedophile.”
“What?” Joshua exclaimed. “When did we figure that out?
But Kent ignored him completely, focused solely on his conversation with Nicole.
CHAPTER 15
“Come again?” Nicole asked.
“Nic, he is a pedophile who was keeping the teenage victim as a sex slave. Our girl must have crossed his path and when the Parrish boy wasn’t available, she snatched the one boy who wouldn’t be reported missing.”
Nicole’s brain worked overtime trying to catch up with her husband. This was all new information.
Now, however, Mr. Varding made sense. If he was caught, his life was over. His dark secret revealed. Her presence was the equivalent of the grim reaper showing up.
“I loved him…” Mr. Varding said, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Well, that confirmed Kent’s suspicions. But when weren’t they validated?
“I know,” Nicole said, trying to build rapport with the creep. “They stole him from you. Treated him horribly. Killed him.”
The gym teacher’s head bobbed up and down, his grip on his gun wavering. “It wasn’t fair.”
“No, no Mr. Varding, it wasn’t,” Nicole tried to keep her tone sympathetic when really she just wanted to shoot the guy.
“We need him alive,” Kent stated. “He knows our female perp.”
She’d figured that out already.
The boy in Mr. Varding’s grip squirmed, bringing the gym teacher’s attention back to the boy.
“Son, what’s your name?” Nicole asked.
“Tom…Tommy,” the boy said, gulping down tears.
“Tommy, you’re fine. We are going to get you out of this, so just sit tight, okay?”
She didn’t tell him that hostages usually got killed because of their efforts to break free. She really didn’t want a death on her hands today.
“We’re just hanging out,” Nicole tried to reassure the boy, which wasn’t really working, since he had the metal barrel of a gun pressed against his temple.
“Tell Varding you understand. Tell him that you’ll talk to the DA for him,” Kent encouraged.
“Mr. Varding, I totally get you were keeping the boy safe. That you loved him. I will talk to the DA for you. We can figure this out…together.”
A look passed over Mr. Varding face. He’d made a decision. His eyes became more focused. The tears stopped. His shoulder tensed. This was it.
Without a clear head shot, Nicole was going to have to go for a shoulder shot, using physics to her advantage. Her shot should spin the man away from the boy and even if he shot, the bullet should go wide.
Should.
Instead, the gym teacher shoved Tommy forward, obscuring any shot from her and put the gun to his head.
“No!” she screamed, but it didn’t matter. Mr. Varding pulled the trigger.
She pulled the boy to her, shielding his eyes. He didn’t need to see his gym teacher’s brains all over the wall.
* * *
Kent disconnected the call as Nicole comforted the boy hostage.
“You can call it in now,” Kent instructed Joshua. “Then get me everything on this supposed gym teacher.”
Their best lead was dead. Gone. All that information just evaporated in a single second. They would try to recreate the man’s life. But pedophiles were a very secretive bunch. They lived false lives, so it was going to be hard to figure out where Mr. Varding and the female unsub intersected.
If only he had been there. He could have talked the man down. Convinced the gym teacher that his final act could be to avenge his boy. The man really believed that he loved the child he was abusing. Kent could have used that.
Nicole’s disgust ran too deep. Her words hadn’t sounded one hundred percent sincere, so they couldn’t cut through the cloud of the man’s grief.
She really needed to work on that.
“Alright, it is all looking clean,” Joshua reported, pulling up Mr. Varding’s financials and work history.
“No arrests. Nothing.”
A very careful pedophile.
“Check his juvie record.”
Someone this careful had to have had a brush with the authorities before. He’d learned caution early on. How to hide his tendencies in his childhood.
Joshua’s fingers raced across the keyboard. “Two arrests, but they are sealed. I don’t even know what they were for.’
Kent smiled. “Tell me one arrest was at age eleven and another at fifteen?”
The morgue assistant’s eyes dilated. “You are freaking me out.”
“It really isn’t that far of a stretch. As we know, the vast majority of pedophiles were sexually molested themselves,” Kent explained. “So he started acting out at the time of his abuse. Since he targets eleven year olds, more than likely that was the age when Varding was molested.”
Joshua nodded. “Okay, that makes sense, but how did you nail the fifteen year old arrest?”
“Come on, Joshua, think it through. A boy had been abused and is coming into his sexual maturity. He is very likely going to act out. More than likely “playing doctor” or at least that was how it was spun with younger boys from the neighborhood. The gym teacher was a time bomb, just waiting to blow. He had to be less than sixteen, otherwise he would have probably been tried as an adult…”
Joshua put his palms together and bent his head over. “I am not worthy.”
“Again, not precognition, but an understanding of the criminal mind,” Kent explained. “But if you want to deify me, who am I to stop you?”
Joshua looked too eager for his own good. “Can I please, please, please start a tribute website?”
“Maybe once I’m officially alive,” Kent responded. “But for now I need you over at Mr. Varding’s house. We need to find the causative link between the gym teacher and our girl before she goes on another killing spree.”
Joshua sprang off his stool and headed for the door.
“Forget something?” Kent asked, offering Joshua his phone. “Just stream to your computer. I want to see everything.”
“Of course,” Joshua answered, then was out the door.
* * *
Nicole was attempting to race through her paperwork at the station. The locker room had been an absolute disaster. She had one task and that was to keep Mr. Varding alive and she had failed miserably.
Now she had to rede
em herself. Get over to the man’s house and find out how he was connected to their female unsub. Thankfully, she hadn’t used her own weapon so there wasn’t an IA inquiry. That would have killed her entire day.
Glick came out of his office and headed to her desk.
“I’m almost done, promise.”
“Oh, yes, I assumed,” Glick responded. “I was more wondering if you’d heard from Ruben?”
Nicole looked up. “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. Is he out on his interview?”
Glick nodded. “His lawyer just called. He missed his second IA meeting this morning. No biggie. She rescheduled, but I thought maybe you two were working a new lead.”
Nicole had actually been shocked her phone hadn’t blown up with Ruben’s texts and calls after the locker room. He was usually all over stuff like that. “I’m sorry, no. I haven’t talked to him this morning.”
Glick patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll figure it out.”
Normally Nicole would have been alarmed at Ruben’s silence, but this wasn’t a normal day for him at all. The guy was a straight shooter and being accused of murder had really thrown him. He wasn’t acting himself at all.
Besides, she had a serial killer to catch.
Putting the final touches on her paperwork, Nicole grabbed her purse and keys. But then her breasts complained. Her phone’s alarm went off at the same time, synchronized perfectly with her breastfeeding schedule.
Fine, a milk pit stop at home, then off to Mr. Varding’s abode.
* * *
Joshua was taking instructions from Kent over his phone. He couldn’t believe his luck. Nicole usually was on the other end. He was in heaven walking through the house with the voice of God in his ear.
“There’s got to be a special room for the boy,” Kent grumbled.
The house had turned out to be pretty boring. Like Kent said, the house was staged to represent a bored, borderline depressed heterosexual middle-aged man. Mr. Varding had inherited the house from his mother two years ago. It didn’t look like he’d redecorated a single thing.
There was still a wooden cuckoo clock on the wall, and against the odds, functional. Joshua thought he’d jump out of his skin when that little bird chirped overhead.
The avocado shag rug was the same as when it was laid down in the 70’s.
Joshua had even found heterosexual porn magazines under the mattress. Mr. Varding had really done a job creating his false life.
Beer in the refrigerator. Not a single lunchable or Go-gurt. Nothing to reveal a child lived in this house with Mr. Varding.
“Now what?” Joshua asked quietly, so the rest of the techs working the house couldn’t hear him.
“There’s got to be a hidden basement or attic room,” Kent explained. “Start knocking on walls.”
This was the Midwest after all. And this house looked like it was built in the fifties, so there should be a storm cellar somewhere. But he’d checked the kitchen, which was the usual place to find a door with a stairwell leading to the shelter.
Joshua snapped his fingers just like Kent did sometimes when he was being brilliant.
“Got something?” Kent asked.
“Maybe,” Joshua muttered and headed out of the house.
Kent was none too happy. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Wait for it,” Joshua said, practically running around the house.
He found a patch of vines piled high. That was new growth, not the old withered vines around the rest of the house.
“Ouch!” Joshua exclaimed as he pulled the vines back. They had some pretty nasty thorns, but he had a job to do. And after a few moments, he found a wooden double door. “Bingo!” he announced.
“Good job,” Kent said in his ear. It was like Joshua’s whole life had led up to this moment. The pinnacle of his existence. He had impressed Kent.
* * *
Nicole walked into the basement that Joshua had found in Mr. Varding’s house.
It was a child’s dream room, if it hadn’t been a sex slave’s prison.
While the walls had no windows, they were painted with fanciful scenes from soccer, football and baseball. The large room was littered with toys. There was a sixty-inch television with every gaming system imaginable.
Mr. Varding was also homeschooling the child, whose name was apparently Johnny, since that name was painted all across the walls.
Nicole doubted that she would ever understand pedophiles. Clearly Mr. Varding cared deeply for Johnny, yet sexually abused him, probably on a daily basis.
She really wasn’t up for delving into this guy’s psyche. Nicole knew that Kent would disapprove. She was supposed to follow the suspects wherever they went, but luckily she wasn’t hunting Mr. Varding. She was just trying to figure out how their female suspect knew that he had a kid stashed in the basement.
Her phone rang. Guess who.
“Yes?” she answered, as crime scene techs buzzed around the basement.
“Pretty dichotomous, right?” Kent asked.
“Yep,” Nicole said, as she walked into the rather large bathroom. There was a clawfoot bathtub and a walk-in shower. Her stomach sunk thinking of what happened in here.
“So tell me, how did our killer know about Johnny?” Kent asked.
“No freaking idea,” Nicole commented, as she walked out of the bathroom and headed to the kitchenette area of the room. There was a refrigerator, larger than her own at home, a microwave, hot plate and toaster oven. She opened the refrigerator. It was stocked with everything a kid would love. String cheese, pudding. In the freezer were enough pizza rolls to choke a large wildebeest. Plus French bread pizzas and ice cream. It looked like Mr. Varding bought stock in Baskin-Robbins.
Everything confirmed the presence of little Johnny. The techs were collecting DNA from the toothbrush. Soon enough they would know who the child really was.
Nicole wondered what Mr. Varding would have done once Johnny reached puberty. Kill him? Dump his body in the river? Despite the love and warmth in the room, she had to remember Johnny was just a sick plaything to Mr. Varding.
She knew they needed the gym teacher to stop Bute and their female serial killer, but honestly Nicole didn’t feel all that bad that Mr. Varding had committed suicide.
Bastard.
“Don’t go down that road,” Kent said in her ear as if he was standing right in front of her. “The man is a tool right now. We have no emotional connection to him or what he did, we just need to track his movements and figure out how he intersected with our girl.”
Nicole took in a deep breath. Kent was right, as freaking always.
“Tell me, where do we start?”
Nicole climbed the stairs up and out of the basement. She needed fresh air and a little privacy to talk to Kent. Out in the back yard, there was a whimsical swing. Sitting down, she pushed off, setting the swing rocking back and forth. It made her miss her baby.
“Is there any indication that Mr. Varding was that artistic?” Kent asked.
Nicole had been to the man’s office and the upper part of the house. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then who decorated the basement walls?”
“Johnny?” Nicole asked.
“No, I think it is too sophisticated for a child.”
Kent was probably right. Why she even wasted thought in doubting him, she didn’t know.
“Joshua is already trying to track down an area artist that might have done the work. I think the next step is to look into where he bought the electronics. Somebody is going to remember that big a set-up.”
Nicole pushed against the lawn again to gain some height. “But couldn’t he just have bought it all off the internet?”
She didn’t need to see Kent to know that his eyebrow had gone up. She’d screwed up again. “Did you see that set-up? That was professionally installed.”
Time to get off the swing. “I’ll set up a canvas of the electronic stores then.”
“No need. Alr
eady got it started.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Walk the neighborhood. Make sure she didn’t figure it out from his home environment.”
“You mean interview neighbors?”
“No, I mean walk the neighborhood. Let all the metadata flow through your brain and come up with some conclusions.”
Dear God, Kent never stopped. Even “dead.”
Like all cops, she had a good intuition, but Kent wanted her intellect and subconscious finely honed. He wanted her making conclusions that no human had a right to make.
“Get, girlfriend.”
Nicole waved to the crime scene officer indicating she was leaving his jurisdiction. He noted the time and waved back.
At the curb, Nicole looked left then right. The neighborhood could have been the picture next to the definition of suburbia. The street was straight as an arrow. All the lawns were nicely manicured. There were minivans in nearly every driveway.
Typical was an understatement.
Then she realized this was intentional. Mr. Varding had picked this place specifically for its blandness. The neighbors were so preoccupied by their own suburban lives, soccer, ballet, Pilates, micro-brew cafes, they hadn’t noticed a predator in their midst.
“How did he get to the school?” Kent prompted in her ear.
Good question. She looked up the route on her phone. She didn’t need Kent’s prompt to know that she should walk it.
If the painter and electronic stores didn’t pan out, then their female unsub would have intersected with Mr. Varding along this path.
And she had to find the connection before another family was slaughtered.
CHAPTER 16
Ruben’s head hurt. No, the back of his skull felt like it was on fire.
He went from a painful daze to fully awake in a single instant, as he realized his hands were bound.
That had been no accident on the street.
His head snapped up, which was a massive mistake. His vision blurred from the agony.
What in the hell had happened?
It made no sense until he remembered the look on Sonya’s face.
Dear God, could he have been so stupid? Was his lawyer the female unsub they were looking for?
2nd Cycle of the Harbinger Series: The continuation of the #1 Hard-boiled/Police Procedural smash Plain Jane Page 15