by J. J. Stone
Ada held up her hands. “Dade called me last night and said there was a case here.”
Pure rage lit James’s eyes as his lips pressed together in a grim line. His head turned slowly to someone in the interview room as the hand visible in the hallway clenched. “Did he?” he growled into the room, presumably at Dade.
Brenda brushed past Ada and bravely made her way to James. “I’m sure Dade was just thinking about the case.”
Ada wanted to follow Brenda but her legs refused to move. She watched Brenda squeeze past James and disappear back into the interview room. That left Ada standing in the hallway like a statue and James straddling between dealing with the situation head-on or returning to the neutrality of the interview room. Neither one could bear the thought of eye contact.
Dade burst out into the hallway from the interview room’s second door. He came alongside Ada, hands planted against his hips. “In all fairness, I should have told you I called her,” he said, locking eyes with James. “But we have a case to solve and she’s been a part of it from day one. So I don’t know what’s going on here,” he wagged his hand between Ada and James, “but we have a killer to catch in four days and we need all the help we can get.” He paused to breathe and, Ada suspected, to gauge just how much he had overstepped his boundaries with his superior.
In a shock move to both of them, James held up his hands in surrender and stepped out fully into the hallway. “Let’s go, then.” He swept his arm toward the room in invitation to both Dade and Ada then strode past them toward the door Ada had just come through.
As soon as James was gone, Dade released his breath in a hiss and scratched his head. “First of all, it’s good to see you.” He gave Ada a lopsided grin that slowly slipped into a remorseful one. “I never got the right chance to tell him before we got here. And it’s been chaos ever since we touched down.”
“It’s OK, Dade.” Ada placed a comforting hand on the agent’s arm. “We have a job to do, and we’re all adult enough to just put our heads down and work.”
“I hope so,” Dade said, tossing a glance at the door James had just left through. He shuffled on his feet for a moment before blurting, “What is going between you two?”
“If he didn’t say anything to you, then nothing needs to be said.” Ada’s eyes dropped to her hands. “Just a misunderstanding, anyway.”
“Vague.”
“But true.”
Dade rolled his eyes. “Women. Always with the drama,” he teased as he playfully nudged Ada into the interview room.
——
“We believe that this latest cult killer is copying Jeffrey Dahmer,” James said to the room stuffed with Milwaukee police officers. The room hummed with energy as the brevity of James’s statement hit full force with everyone.
“At least we know what type of psycho we’re looking for,” an officer in the back of the group called out.
“We estimate that the subject is targeting adolescent males ages six to thirteen,” James continued. “The body that was discovered had amputated limbs and various organs missing. The body found also appeared to have been subjected to partial chemical exposure. Possibly the suspect attempting to disintegrate the body.”
A few officers winced noticeably and shifted in their seats.
Ada glanced over at the case board and her eyes caught on one of the crime scene photos of the body. She tried to imagine pouring acid onto the body of a child and had to look away as nausea erupted inside her.
“As I’m sure you know, there’s a massive storm system set to hit the area in four days. My team and I will try to have the case wrapped by then, but we’ll need the cooperation of the entire Milwaukee police department if we’re going to have a chance at that.” James nodded to Brenda, who started passing stacks of briefs around the room. “All of our highlights are in the briefs being handed to you. If you come up with something of value, please don’t hesitate to alert either myself or anyone on the team.”
The room filled with a dull roar as the officers broke off into groups to discuss what they had just been told. James nodded to the chief then turned to leave the room. Ada watched him head back toward the interview room and decided it was time to face the music. She stepped through the hallway door moments after him and lengthened her strides to try to catch up to him.
“We’re not doing this, Miss Brandt,” James said without turning around.
Damn his impeccable hearing. “James, please, I just want to apol—“
“I’m not doing this.” James half turned to her as he paused in front of the interview room door.
“So, you’re OK with the massive elephant in the room?”
“Guess so.” James shoved the door open and slammed it behind him, leaving Ada alone in the hallway.
CHAPTER 10
Jake Warner could see the faint lights of civilization beckoning to him just a few yards in the distance. He pressed his right side against a tree and checked the shard of shirt he had wrapped around his left foot. The blood had completely soaked through. Jake looked back into the cavernous woods he had just stumbled out of and saw the red trail of left footprints marking his journey harsh against the moonlit snow.
He pulled the massive hunter’s jacket tighter around his eight-year-old body and plowed on through the knee-high snow. He just had a few more steps. A few more steps and he would find someone to call his mom. She was probably looking all over for him. She had probably gotten Garrett’s mom and dad to look with her. The thought of Garrett made a huge lump bulge in Jake’s throat, so he shook his head and heaved his shredded foot down into the frigid relief of the snow.
As he drew closer to the twinkling lights, he saw that they belonged to a gas station. There were two cars at the pumps, a minivan with a fat old lady scowling at the pump’s screen, and a big truck like Uncle Ryan’s with a hunter filling up gas cans. Jake’s feet shuffled faster across the thinning snow. He opened his mouth to call to the man, but a burning croak was all that came out.
He watched as the woman slammed the pump’s nozzle into its holder and climbed back into her minivan. With the last few ounces of strength he had left, Jake broke into a limping jog, trying to get to the gas station before either car could leave. He waved his left arm in the air, keeping his throbbing right arm tight against his chest. He tried calling out again and managed a low sob this time.
The minivan pulled away from the gas station, leaving the truck and the hunter as Jake’s last hope. He had almost reached the side of the gas station when his left foot refused to function and he collapsed onto his front, sliding forward a few inches on the crusty ice. He cried out as his face burst into fiery pain at the ice’s knife-like skid.
Heavy footsteps crunched up to him in the dirty snow of the gas station parking lot. Jake tried to look up at the approaching stranger, but could only manage to lift his head an inch or two off the ice. “Ple … help …” Jake croaked, hot tears running down his cheeks, burning the fresh gashes there.
Two strong hands gently turned Jake over and he looked up into the panicked face of the hunter. “Someone help!” The man shouted as he surveyed Jake’s body.
Jake looked up into the sky and stared at the stars. He thought he heard someone else come out of the gas station. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the hunter stand and wave at someone to call for help. Jake just stared up at the glittering night sky. It was something he thought he’d never see again and now as he lay underneath it, he realized he’d never seen anything so beautiful in all his life.
——
“He’s going to surgery in a few minutes, so I can’t let you speak with him for long,” the nurse called over her shoulder as she rushed down the bustling hospital hallway, the BAU team hot on her tail.
“Who found him?” James asked as he sidestepped a wheelchair.
The nurse arrived at the room and pu
shed the door open. “A local hunter. He’s still in the waiting room if you want to talk with him.”
James turned to Dade, who without hesitation wordlessly retreated back to the front of the hospital. James stepped to the side of the open door to allow Brenda to enter the room first. He nodded thanks to the nurse and stepped into the room.
The moment James’s eyes fell on the scrawny body cloaked in lines and tubes and bandages, his heart clenched. Jake Warner was abruptly replaced by Olivia. With any case concerning children, this would happen, despite James’s best efforts to prepare himself. James shut his eyes to clear the image, but his mind balked, searing into his brain the visage of Olivia lying in a hospital bed. He hissed and spun on his heel, pinching the bridge of his nose. Focus, the commanding portion of his subconscious barked.
“Jake? Can you hear me?” Brenda asked in a calm murmur.
Brenda’s voice broke through the fog in James’s head. He took a deep breath and turned back to face Jake’s bed. He watched from a distance as the boy groggily opened his eyes halfway and attempted to look up at Brenda. “Where’s my mom?” the boy asked, his voice like sandpaper against metal.
Brenda carefully sat down on the very edge of Jake’s bed and folded her hands in her lap. “Your mother’s on her way, Jake.” She smiled at him. “My name is Brenda.”
“Are you a cop?”
“I’m with the FBI. Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?”
Jake registered James’s presence in the room and stiffly turned his head toward him. His eyes widened slightly as stark fear descended on his battered face. “Who is that?” he said, raising his left hand a few centimeters off the bed to point at James.
James remained where he was and opened his palms toward the boy. “My name is James. I’m here with Brenda.” The boy’s fear was an instant indicator that their suspect was a white male. Given the length of time that Jake had been missing, it would be months before Jake would be comfortable around male strangers.
Mammoth tears dripped from Jake’s eyes, spreading into stains on the bandages on his torn cheeks. “I want to go home.”
“You’ll get to go home soon, Jake.” Brenda’s repeated use of the boy’s name seemed to calm him slightly. “Would it be OK if I ask you a couple of questions?”
Jake blinked a few times to clear his tear-filled eyes and nodded carefully, as if the motion might shatter him into a million pieces.
“How were you able to get to the gas station?” Rather than diving right into the living hell Jake had surely endured the past week, Brenda began with the end of his ordeal.
“He forgot to lock the door,” Jake said. “He always locked the door, and then last night … he didn’t.”
“So you were in the woods since yesterday?”
“I just wanted to go home.” Jake’s voice cracked miserably as the tears returned. “I didn’t want to go back to the cabin.”
James licked his dry lips as he drove his hands into his pockets. “You were in a cabin, Jake?”
Jake flicked his eyes to him. “It was like my uncle’s hunting cabin.”
“And it took you a whole day to walk back to town?”
“Yeah.” Jake looked down at his heavily-swathed left foot. “I lost my boot when I was crossing the creek. It fell through the ice. I cut my foot, so I had to wrap my shirt around it.”
James smiled genuinely at the boy. “Sounds like you’re pretty good in the woods.”
Jake beamed back at him, a weirdly crooked grin that looked like he’d forgotten how to smile. “My uncle taught me what to do if I ever got lost.”
A gaggle of nurses streamed into the room, signaling James and Brenda’s exit. Brenda winked at Jake as she stood. “I’ll go see if your mom is here, OK?”
Jake didn’t hear her. He was too overwhelmed by the flurry of movement around him as the nurses prepped him for surgery.
James touched his fingertips to Brenda’s elbow and led her out of the room. “That kid’s awesome,” Brenda said as they reentered the hallway traffic.
“Did you see his reaction to me?” James asked.
Brenda nodded. “Guess that gives us a general physical type to go off of.”
Dade turned the corner and skidded to a halt in front of them. “The hunter left before I got there but left his contact info at the front desk.” He wagged a strip of paper between his fingers. “I looked up the address on my phone. He’s out in the boonies, but we should be able to get there within a couple of hours, depending on road conditions.”
James shook his head. “Let’s talk with Jake’s mom first and get more background.”
——
Ada winced as yet another slap connected with the door across the hall. She re-crossed her legs for the fifth time that minute and wistfully glanced at the open doorway of the BAU’s temporary headquarters. The rest of the team had taken off the moment news of the boy being found had reached the station, which had left Ada alone in a room full of data.
Ada had been reviewing everything on the still-missing boys for almost an hour when a shrieking, frantic woman had been escorted down the hall and into the interview room across from the FBI’s room. The officer herding the woman had roughly deposited her into the empty interview room then turned and walked away. The woman had flown to the now locked door and began screaming for an explanation of why she was being held. That screaming had been going on for almost half an hour.
As suddenly as it had started, the shrieking across the hall abruptly ceased. Ada froze and held her breath, praying this was an actual reprieve. When ten solid seconds of silence passed, Ada stood and took two cautious steps toward the doorway. Through it, she could see the room across the hall. The room’s long window gave her a clear view of the room, which looked like it had suddenly been vacated. One of the room’s metal chairs was on its side and pushed into a far corner, and the table had been shoved against the far wall. Ada continued to creep toward the room, stopped in the hallway, and went up on tiptoes to see if she could spot the woman.
The woman, visibly drained yet stubbornly determined, sprang up from the floor and pummeled her fist against the window, sending Ada’s heart into her throat. “You can’t hold me here! I wasn’t breaking any laws!” the woman yelled at Ada.
Ada stumbled back a step, managing to hold back the startled shout poised just behind her clenched teeth. She studied the woman, noted the matted hair that looked like it hadn’t seen shampoo in a few days, the smeared mascara giving her eyes an indented effect, the soiled state of her flimsy clothing.
“The hell are you staring at?” the woman said to Ada, her voice shrill even behind the thick glass of the interview room.
Ada retreated back to the FBI’s room, wincing as the woman hurled insults at her back. She scooped her earbuds off the table and slipped them in, selecting a robust playlist on her phone to drown out the woman’s renewed antics.
Putting her mind back into the case, she splayed the photos of the still-missing boys across the table. It still sickened her how many photos gazed back at her. In the last six weeks, seven boys matching the victim profile in a hundred mile radius had vanished into thin air, leading the FBI to believe that their latest suspect had been working for longer than they had originally thought. One body had been found discarded. Jake Warner had presumably escaped. That left five boys still unaccounted for.
The seven missing boys had only one thing in common: their ages. They were all from various backgrounds, towns, and races. The FBI’s parameters in their search for potential victims had been the age range that Dahmer had gone after and any missing person reports filed since the Sacramento killer had been caught. It was becoming apparent that the copycat killers only worked one at a time. When one killer was stopped, the next would go into action.
Ada took Jake Warner’s picture from the lin
eup and read the snippets of case information scrawled on the back. Jake had gone missing a week and two days ago. There was only one boy that had been abducted after him. If Jake was mentally stable, he might know where the latest boy was and if he was still alive. As many of these boys as possible needed to be alive.
The song that had been pounding in Ada’s ears ended and in the brief moment of silence between tracks, Ada heard footsteps out in the hallway. She plucked the earbuds out and got up to see what was happening. The door to the interview room across the hall had just clunked shut. Ada saw Brenda and James, along with an officer, taking up their posts in the room. Brenda rearranged the room’s three pieces of furniture and sat down in one of the chairs at the clinical table. She extended a hand to the chair across from hers. The officer pressed back against the window, the line of defense between the door and the woman. James strode to the corner of the room behind the woman and leaned back into it, his arms clamped together and snug against his chest.
Ada stepped out into the hallway and pressed her back against the wall, facing the scene in the interview room. The woman was suddenly a million times more interesting, taking two FBI agents and a police officer to talk to her.
——-
“Mrs. Warner—”
The woman winced and slammed her purse on the table. “Miss. There’s no ‘mister’ in this picture.”
Brenda folded her hands and upturned her lips ever so slightly into a passable smile. “Miss Warner,” she began again, “why were you brought in?”
The woman tore through her purse, intent on locating something. “The hell if I know,” she muttered. Her face brightened as she pulled a cigarette from her purse.
The officer held out a hand. “Valorie, you know you can’t smoke in here.”
The woman grimaced and continued to place the cigarette between her chapped lips. “Fine, I won’t light it.”
The officer frowned at her but lowered his hand.
Brenda flipped open the folder she’d brought into the room and scanned the first page. “It looks like you were brought in today for solicitation of a police officer, Valorie.” She flicked her eyes up at Valorie. “Is it all right if I call you that?”