Deadly Webs Omnibus

by James Hunt

  ***

  While Grant searched the trailer, Mocks called the precinct and got an update on the video. They got a hit on the suspect in the Annie Mauer abduction.

  “Parker Gallient,” Mocks said, walking up to Grant and flashing him the picture. “Convicted felon for grand theft, assault with a deadly weapon, possession, and endangering the life of an officer. He was released by the state six months ago, and his probation officer hasn’t seen him since.”

  “Six months ago,” Grant said. “That’s around the same time that website was created. Any affiliates or addresses we can check out?”

  “They’re putting that together now,” Mocks answered, “and we have some good news.” Mocks clapped her hands together. “The chief finally authorized the rest of the AMBER Alerts. They’re going to be pushed within the hour.”

  “Good,” Grant said, removing the gloves after his sweep of the trailer. “Let’s get Parker’s picture to the media. I want his face plastered on every screen in the northwest.”

  “Already done. Find anything?” Mocks asked.

  “Since it was a rental, we only tagged the supplies he brought with him. Looked like he planned on camping out for the next few days. He also had passports for both him and the kid. They looked legit.” Grant crumpled the blue glove into a fist. “It could be what the others are doing.” He bit his lower lip. “Sam give you an update on the website?”

  “No, but I can call him while we’re waiting on the Parker info.”

  “I’ll wrap up inside and meet you back at the car.”

  With the precinct phones jammed from chaos that was the city, concerned parents calling every five seconds, Mocks dialed Sam directly. She had stolen his number from his HR files when Cyber started working on the website. It wasn’t exactly protocol, but no one tried to stop her.

  “Hello?” Sam asked.

  “Hey, it’s Mocks. We need an update on the site. Did you manage to cross reference Craig Johnson with any of the usernames?”

  “How did you—never mind,” Sam said. “Yes, I managed to link Craig to one of the accounts. He was one of the sixty that actually finished all of the coursework.”

  “Sixty,” Mocks said, raising her eyebrows. “That’ll help weed out the amateurs.”

  “I also tracked Parker’s truck through the traffic cams after he left the mall,” Sam said. “He dumped it at some restaurant south of downtown. It’s where his trail ends. You want the address?”

  “Yeah.” Mocks recorded it in the memory bank and nodded. “Thanks, Sam. You have anything else?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Keep digging.” Mocks ended the call and leaned against the passenger door, waiting for Grant to finish. She glanced around the poor neighborhood, with its houses of peeling paint, dirt yards, and chain link fences.

  Mocks didn’t like being this far north. It wasn’t far from here where she used to go on her benders. Days of no sleep, no food, and all the heroin she could handle. Her hand shook just thinking about it. She reached inside her jacket and retrieved the green Bic. She flicked it on and off, the flame wiggling over the metal hole. Her hand steadied when she held it. Every time.

  Her old rehab group had called it a trigger. All those years of spoons and needles had left more than a physical mark. Whenever she was stressed or went through some adrenaline-fueled event like today, her hand wouldn’t stop shaking until she grabbed the lighter. Her sponsor had told her once that her body was just looking for something familiar to help calm itself, but Mocks knew the real reason: her hand was always still as water when she wanted a hit.

  Mocks didn’t want the familiarity of the lighter. She wanted the familiarity of what came next: the high. Heroin, weed, Oxy, coke, it didn’t matter as long as it made her feel good. She flicked the lighter a few more times and a gust of wind blew out the flame.

  It was one of the biggest reasons she didn’t want kids. And no matter how many times Rick pestered her about it, she just couldn’t bring herself to say yes. It wasn’t that she was afraid she would use again; those days were buried. She was scared that her kid would use.

  In the support groups Mocks had attended when she finally got clean, a lot of the people had addicts as parents. And there was strong evidence that suggested that certain genetic codes were more susceptible to addiction. She didn’t want that for her kid. She didn’t want that for anyone.

  Grant stepped out of the trailer. “What’d Sam say?”

  “He said sixty of the users actually completed all of the coursework. He also confirmed that Craig Johnson was on the list, and so was Parker Gallient, the one who took Annie Mauer. He traced Parker’s truck outside of a restaurant on Seattle’s south side,” Mocks answered.

  “Not the friendliest place for us,” Grant answered, then gestured to the fist that held the Bic. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Mocks answered, tucking the lighter back inside her inner jacket pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Lunchtime traffic had picked up in the city, and it added an extra twenty minutes on their way to the restaurant. It was a seafood joint, but in Seattle, seafood places were a dime a dozen. Whenever one went out of business, three more took its place. Rick loved seafood. Mocks figured she was the only person in Seattle that hated it.

  A heavy scent of fish blasted Mocks’s senses the moment they stepped through the doors, and she gagged in her mouth loud enough to catch the attention of the table of middle-aged women to her left. They stopped eating, but Mocks simply followed Grant to the kitchen with the hostess, where the smell only worsened.

  Once past the sautéed shrimp, steamed clams, and baked salmon, Mocks shoved Grant and the hostess aside and burst out the back door. Outside, she lifted her face to the sky and inhaled deep breaths.

  “Thought you’d be used to that smell by now,” Grant said, side-stepping a very shocked hostess, who looked at Mocks like she had grown a second head. “You’ve lived in Seattle for what? Four years now?”

  “Three years, five months, three weeks, two days, thirteen hours and some change,” Mocks answered, sucking in another deep breath of cold coastal air. “But who’s counting.”

  “This the truck?” Grant asked.

  The hostess nodded. She wore all black, and her blonde hair had matching dark roots. “I didn’t see who dropped it off. I asked around and none of the kitchen staff saw anything either.”

  Mocks finally lowered her face, the queasiness in her stomach easing now that she wasn’t surrounded by fish fumes. She walked over to the truck, the doors closed. “You found it exactly like this?”

  “Well, no,” the hostess said, playing with her hands. “The door was open. I just thought maybe someone left it open by accident. So I just shut it.” She took a step back. “Does this have to do with all those kids going missing?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Grant said. “We’ll let you know if we need anything else.”

  Mocks walked around to the passenger side and slipped on a glove. She opened the door, then the glove compartment. “Nothing but trash.” She checked under and behind the seats. Nothing but rusted tools and more fast food wrappers.

  “Anything?” Mocks asked.

  “Nope,” Grant answered, shutting the door and peeling off his own glove.

  “Grant,” Mocks said. “I think we need to start looking at this realistically.” She stepped around the truck’s hood and leaned against the driver side tire-well. “There could be another dozen kids that are taken within the next twenty-four hours, or some that were taken that haven’t even been called in yet. Whoever is behind this meant for it all to happen today.”

  “You think someone is pulling the strings?” Grant asked.

  “Whoever built that website for all of those creeps to use had a specific purpose.” Mocks watched Grant mull it over.

  “You think it’s a diversion?” Grant asked.

  “Sleight of hand, right?” Mocks answered. “We need to figure out why all of this is happenin
g today.”

  “All right,” Grant said. “We’ll canvas the street and see if anyone saw anything. Look for security footage, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “After today, I think all of our luck might be out,” Mocks said.

  ***

  One of the detriments of being a detective in this century was technology. It was a gift and a curse. Their Cyber division could do so many things with tracking digital footprints. But in the self-absorbed age of selfies and social media, one hardly looked up from their phones. And that made finding witnesses hard. No one saw anything. Maybe Mocks was right. Their luck had run out.

  Forensics arrived shortly after their canvas of the area, and the team looked used and abused. There were a limited number of forensic field units, and with the sudden influx of abductions, they were being called all over the city. Grant and Mocks left the team to their devices and drove back to the station.

  Grant kept stealing glances at the timer on his watch. They were already past the four-hour mark. Time was tight. Time was always tight.

  “You keep checking that thing like it’ll tell you where to find our missing kids,” Mocks said, her gaze cast out toward the window.

  “It helps keep me on my toes,” Grant said. “You have any secret theories you’re keeping to yourself?”

  “I think Rick is cheating on me,” Mocks answered.

  She tossed it out in the open so casually that it took Grant a minute before he could wrap his head around what she’d just said.

  “Why do you think—”

  “We haven’t had sex in over a month,” Mocks said. “We fight constantly. It’s like I’m living with someone I don’t even know anymore.”

  Mocks finally turned away from the window, and Grant got a look at her face. No tears. No lines of grief. Nothing more than a plain, stoic expression of realization. She’d been thinking about this for a long time. He’d thought something was off with her, and now he knew the cause.

  “What are you two fighting about?” Grant asked.

  Mocks twirled the Bic between her fingers. “He wants kids.”

  “And you don’t?”

  Mocks sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “You need to talk about it,” Grant said. “This isn’t one of those instances where you can just sweep it under the rug.”

  “We’ve tried,” Mocks said. “I’ll admit that I’m the one who gets defensive about it, but I just—I just…” She curled her fingers, shaking her hands, and then dropped them into her lap, lifeless. “I’m scared, Grant.”

  “Is Rick working today?” Grant asked.

  “No,” Mocks answered.

  Grant flicked on the blinker and took the next left he could make.

  “Grant, we don’t have time—”

  “If there is one thing you know about me, Mocks, it’s that I am a master of time.” Grant swerved between parked cars on the side street and looped back around to the highway that would take them to Mocks’s apartment. “Before Ellen died, there were hundreds of times where I could have gone home for lunch, left work early, gone to work late, and the world would have kept on spinning. We get so caught up in fast forward that we forget to appreciate the pause button. And trust me when I tell you that now is one of those moments to hit pause.”

  “The clock doesn’t stop for those kids,” Mocks said.

  Grant saw Mocks’s high-rise in the distance. “I’m more than capable of researching the Internet by myself, and when I figure something out, you will be my first call.”

  The rest of the trip, Mocks remained quiet. She only said two words when he pulled up to the curb of the sidewalk outside her building. “Thank you.”

  “Talk to him, Mocks,” Grant said. “Rick wouldn’t cheat on you.”

  “How do you know that?” Mocks asked, looking at him with eyes as big as saucers. She’d never looked more like a kid than she did right now.

  “Because Rick looks at you the way I looked at Ellen,” Grant said.

  Mocks smiled, shut the door, and disappeared inside the building. The action provided a small piece of hope that Grant clung to on the way back to the station. It was a hope that helped block out all the painful memories from his own past. The daily struggle to keep moving never ended.

  The old phrase ‘time heals all wounds’ was only half true. Yes, they did eventually heal. But they also changed you; twisted you into something different than you were before. Everything was still functional and you were alive, but you were not the same. Scars never disappeared. They lingered until your last day.

  The precinct was still surrounded by the press when Grant arrived, and this time he avoided their questioning altogether by parking in the compound lot around back. It was fenced off, and only authorized personnel were allowed inside.

  Grant did a quick check in with Sam to see if he was able to pull anything else from the website, but he said he was still trying to get through some of the firewalls and that he needed more time.

  All that was left was to research what Mocks had brought up. It was a brilliant theory, and it made sense the more thought he gave it. He opened a handful of tabs on his browser and went to work on finding what was so special about today.

  Grant started small, staying strictly within Seattle, and then when nothing came of that, he expanded to the entire state of Washington. The only note of value he was able to find was his own ceremony that had taken place that morning. No other large-scale events had made the news, no meetings or large gatherings. Today was just another Saturday in late March.

  The chair squeaked as Grant leaned back. He drummed his fingers on the desk. There had to be another connection, something else that tied them together. They had three confirmed cases, if you included the Givens case, where the abductors took this class. So what connected them?

  Grant stopped drumming his fingers. Spiders.

  Grant cross-referenced spiders and Seattle, and he received several hits, many of them from Seattle arachnid groups, which there were more of than he would have guessed. But there was only one hit that connected what Mallory Givens had said to Grant’s current predicament.

  A gang from the Philippines had made their way to the western shores of the United States. And Grant knew just the man he could talk to about it.

  Chapter 6

  When Mocks pressed the tenth floor button on the elevator, a million thoughts raced through her mind. Her left hand moved and she looked down to see it holding the Bic lighter. She stared at it a moment and then returned it to her pocket. If Rick was having an affair, if there was some woman in their bed, then she needed to face it without the crutch of her past.

  Mocks had been clean for a year when they met. And it was around the time when her therapist and sponsor thought it would be okay for her to enter a relationship. She’d done the plant thing, then the animal thing, making sure she could keep both of them alive before setting her affections on anything human. Her sponsor had also recommended abstaining from sex for at least six weeks after the start of a new relationship.

  She slept with Rick on their first date. It was one rule she didn’t care that she broke.

  And as luck would have it, Rick turned out to be the last new person she’d ever sleep with, though she didn’t see it that way in the beginning. She remained guarded in their first few months together. The sex helped though. A lot.

  Rick never pried about her past, but she knew he had questions. After all, she couldn’t hide the scars on her arms from years of needles. When the day finally came for Mocks to reveal her past, it exploded from her lips in a stream of breathless, run-on sentences. Once she finished, she thought Rick might take off. She had prepared herself for that. But he didn’t. He stayed. But it wasn’t easy.

  Mocks put Rick through every hell that she experienced. The backlash from all of those years she abused herself were thrust onto him. But no matter how dark it got, no matter what she said, no matter what she did, he stayed. And finally, those walls she’d built cracked. An
d while they didn’t come tumbling down, a doorway formed, and Rick was finally allowed inside.

  Through it all, Rick never pushed harder than she wanted. Anytime she said stop, he stopped. Anytime she told him she needed space, he waited. Whenever she got so angry she broke something of his, he kept quiet until she calmed down. He was the most patient man she’d ever met. She never understood why he stuck around. Probably the sex.

  Their engagement was short. When Mocks was ready, he asked, and she didn’t want to wait. She had found someone with an unshakable foundation, and there wasn’t anyone else she saw spending the rest of her life with.

  But the move to Seattle when she was offered a detective’s position had taken its toll. The hours were harsher than she expected them to be, and the added celebrity that came with being a former addict, along with a partner with Grant’s history, only added to the gossip.

  The rest of the officers at the precinct eventually accepted her regardless of her past. She knew Grant had a lot to do with that. Everyone in the department respected him. When they were first paired together, the stories they told about his career in homicide aired on the side of legend. But when she finally met the man behind the myth, she realized that he was mortal like the rest of them. A very talented detective, but still a man.

  And Grant was right. This talk was long overdue. When Rick had the kid conversation with her a few months ago, she didn’t handle it well. And they’d both used work as an excuse to put it off. He’d been pulling doubles, and their only time together were the few hours when they shared a bed where the space between them grew larger every night.

  The inertia of the elevator’s stop made the bundle of nerves in Mocks’s stomach rise, and then settle. The doors opened, and Mocks hesitated. She didn’t want to take that first step. But that’s what it took. That’s how you did the hard things. You just placed one foot in front of the other. One at a time.

  Mocks entered the hallway, her footsteps silent on the carpet. She passed her neighbors until she got to apartment ten-nineteen. They picked it because it had a beautiful view of the city, though she found herself admiring it less these days.