When No One Is Watching

by Natalie Charles - When No One Is Watching

  “The finger of God,” he said, extending his own index finger by way of illustration. “It points to life and death.” He turned his index finger to press against his own sternum. “And it pointed to me.”

  Chapter 11

  “It’s him.” Mia was shaking by the time they’d left the greenhouse. “That’s Valentine.”

  “I think you’re right, but we need more,” Gray said. “I can’t arrest someone for being a creep, and gut feelings don’t hold up in court.”

  “Did you notice how he didn’t yawn when we both did, even though he was watching us? Yawning is an empathetic response. It suggests he lacks empathy.”

  Gray stifled a yawn at the suggestion. “Even so, I can’t put seems to lack empathy on an affidavit for a warrant.”

  “He knows we were there looking for him.” Her throat tightened at the memory of Austin’s wide eyes and bloody hand. “That ‘finger of God’ thing? He was playing games with us.”

  “Delusions of grandeur.”

  “He thinks he has some kind of authority from God to take and give life.” She shook her head. “It’s him. And now that he knows we’ve found him, we may not have much time. We have to find that poor girl.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not too late.” Gray already had his cell phone in hand by the time they reached the outdoors. “D’Augostino? It’s Bartlett. I think we found Valentine. I need you to get a few guys over to the science museum. Yeah, you heard me right. And I need vehicle registration information. Name is Austin Quinlan.”

  Mia’s stomach boiled acid. Her pulse wouldn’t slow to a normal pace. It had taken every ounce of her strength to hold it together in that greenhouse when all she wanted to do was grab Austin and demand to know where her sister was. They stood on the sidewalk while Gray spoke to D’Augostino, and Mia held her hands in fists to stop her fingers from shaking. The T rumbled past.

  “Get this,” Gray said, clicking off his phone. “The suspect drives a black GMC pickup truck. That’s the same vehicle a witness saw leaving the missing woman’s apartment building on the night of her disappearance.”

  Sparks darted through Mia’s veins. “Do you have enough for a warrant?”

  “I want to place him at the scene. This needs to be solid. Come on.” He darted left.

  Mia did a quick jog to catch up to him. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to find that truck.”

  He led the way, pacing up and around the first floor of the parking garage. His strides were long and efficient, and Mia found herself having to work to keep up. “Do we know the license plate?” She was breathing heavier, slightly winded from the excitement and the effort of the search.

  “Mass. plates, 256-TLR.” He pointed to the stairwell. “Let’s try the next floor.”

  But Austin hadn’t parked on the second floor, either. Mia was beginning to fear he’d travelled by public transportation when they reached the third floor. There, parked almost right next to the stairwell they’d just climbed, was a black GMC pickup truck with the correct license plates.

  “Perfect,” Gray said to himself, and removed his cell phone as it chimed. “This is Bartlett. Are you here yet? Well, when you arrive, drive up to the third floor of the parking garage and look for me.” He dropped the phone back into the carrier. “CSU’s coming. I want to check out this truck.”

  “But you don’t have a search warrant.”

  “Don’t need one to look at the outside of the vehicle. It’s parked in a public garage, so he doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy. We’re free to take a look around.”

  He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and put them on before walking around the truck. Mia watched him as he checked the seams of the doors and the glass. An enormous metal toolbox occupied a large space on the truck bed. Preoccupied with imagining what a monster would do with such a thing, Mia couldn’t tear her eyes away from it.

  “Is that where he puts them, you think? In that metal box?” Living girls and dead ones. It was the perfect size for transporting slender, petite women.

  Gray’s face pulled into a frown. “Could be.”

  “All this time I thought he’d selected his victims because they were small enough for him to overpower,” she said. “But he may have selected them based on who would have fit in that toolbox.”

  “It’s a good theory.” Gray was crouching by the driver’s-side door, running his gloved finger along the seam. “That will be one of the first places we search after we get this son of a bitch.”

  She stared at the dents on the side of the box, wondering if they’d been caused by someone who’d fought back. Her skin was cold, even though the air in the garage was stiflingly hot. She took visual measurements of the box, pacing around it to get a sense of how large it was.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Mia started. She hadn’t realized Gray was watching her. “I’m trying to figure out what he uses this for. If it’s really for transporting his victims, then I’m confused.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because even a woman of small stature would be cramped in this box.” Mia’s forehead tensed as she considered what that kind of ride would be like. She couldn’t dwell on the image. “I would never fit in this box, and Lena was taller than me.” She ran her hands through her hair in frustration. “There must be another explanation.”

  “Just give me a few hours, Mia,” he said solemnly, coming up to her until they were nearly touching. “Then you’ll be able to ask this bastard everything you want to know about your sister.”

  He’d meant it to be comforting, she was sure. But in that moment, Mia felt sick to her stomach. She was possibly hours from knowing what had happened to Lena, and after all of this time, she wasn’t even sure she was prepared to know the truth.

  * * *

  “So this is Valentine’s truck, huh?”

  Gray straightened at the sound of D’Augostino’s voice. “We think so,” he said. “He’s a lab tech. General creep.”

  “Course he is.” D’Augostino didn’t look surprised to see Mia, but he didn’t look as though he approved, either. He gave her a quick nod before taking a walk around the vehicle. “I’ve got Morrison and Langley keeping a lookout, and Hank Forrest is coming from CSU. He was right behind me.”

  As if on cue, Hank appeared in the stairwell, crime scene kit in hand. “Lieutenant Bartlett,” he said with a smile. “What’ve you got, man?”

  “Possibly a killer’s truck. We need to find some blood, and we need to get it processed quickly.”

  “DNA profile’s gonna take weeks.”

  “Typing is fine for now.” They could quickly match the blood on the car to the blood types found in Kate Haley’s apartment. “We’ll have to do what we can.”

  He opened his cell again and pulled up the number for Gail Ashford. She was his contact at the district attorney’s office, and he had her on speed dial. “It’s Gray Bartlett,” he said when she answered. “I need to get a few search warrants.”

  “What are you searching?”

  “I’ve got a suspect in the Valentine case. I need a warrant to search his truck, and I need to get another warrant to search his house.”

  “Valentine?” He heard her typing as he spoke. “What do you have?”

  He told her what he had so far, and he knew it wasn’t enough. General suspicions wouldn’t be sufficient for a judge to sign a warrant, and Gail told him so.

  “I know,” Gray assured her. “We’re working on getting more.”

  “Working? Working how?” She had a suspicious edge to her voice.

  “Working legally. I’m staring at his truck right now. It’s parked in a public garage, and I’ve got CSU looking for evidence.”

  “If you have probable cause to search his truck, that would fall under an exception to the warrant requirement. A truck can be driven away, so by the time we executed a warrant, any evidence you were looking for may be gone.”

  “I
don’t have probable cause. Yet,” Gray said. “That’s why I’ve got CSU looking around.”

  “I’ll start working on it, but keep me posted on this, okay? If you open those doors prematurely or based only on reasonable suspicion, anything you find there or as a result of the search will be inadmissible.”

  Gray nodded. He knew all of this, but Gail liked giving reminders. “I know.”

  “Valentine,” she said quietly. “That’s a big fish. Don’t let him get away.”

  “I’m doing my best, Gail. Thanks.” He disconnected the call.

  Mia perched against the cement wall of the garage, her arms folded and her face dark as the action around her continued. Gray approached her. “How are you doing?” He couldn’t imagine what it might be like for her to come face-to-face with the man who might have killed her sister.

  She looked at him with wide, haunted eyes. “Numb? I feel like I’m in a dream sequence or something.”

  He worried about her. He’d asked her to come with him because he didn’t want her to be alone—not when threats against her were turning up, and guns with her fingerprints were being used to kill people. He could be her protector and her alibi, as needed. This was how he’d justified it. Now as he looked at the rings under her eyes and a complexion that was turning sallow with fatigue, Gray wondered if he’d made an error in judgment.

  “This is going to be another long day,” he said. “Maybe you should go to a hotel or stay with a friend. Get some rest.”

  She choked out a small laugh. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep.” She narrowed her eyes as she watched Hank shine a pocket flashlight across the vehicle. “I’ve waited nearly a year for this. I want to be awake when it happens.”

  Gray nodded. He couldn’t say that he’d feel any different if the tables were reversed. He made his way back to Hank. “We need to work quickly. Valentine knows we’re here. Check underneath the handle on the driver’s side.”

  Hank crouched beside the door and shone his flashlight up beneath the handle. “Can I ask what you’re looking for? Just curious.”

  “Blood. His blood or the victim’s. There was blood all over the crime scene, and I’m betting he missed a few spots.”

  “Car looks clean, Lieutenant,” Hank said as he removed a cotton swab from his kit and swiped beneath the handle. “I’ll bet he ran it through the car wash recently.”

  “The car wash doesn’t get everything,” Gray said, exuding a confidence he didn’t fully feel. “We need to check every inch of this car for the spots he missed.”

  Hank applied a drop of chromogen and a drop of hydrogen peroxide to the swab. It didn’t change color. “Clean.”

  Gray folded his arms and pulled himself straighter. “Let’s keep looking. He was carrying a woman’s body. Where else would he touch?”

  “I’ll check the other handles.”

  “Check the back, too.” Mia stepped away from the wall. “And check that toolbox.” She looked at Gray. “We can check that, right? It’s out in the open.”

  “Open it up,” said D’Augostino. “You’ve got probable cause for a warrantless search.”

  “Based on what?” Gray narrowed his gaze at D’Augostino.

  “The automobile exception,” said D’Augostino. “That interior could be soaked in the victim’s blood, and the perp could leave the state before we have the chance to get a search warrant. We can pop open the door and take a look around.”

  “There’s no probable cause. We haven’t even found blood on the vehicle.”

  “What do you need for probable cause?” Hank was listening, interested.

  “Blood spatter. Something that indicates this truck has been used to commit a crime.”

  “How about a glove?”

  The voice was Mia’s, and she was standing beside the passenger-side window, staring intently into the cabin of the vehicle.

  “What kind of glove?” Gray was at her side in an instant, squinting into the window.

  Then he saw it. Shoved between the interior console and the passenger’s seat was a glove that blended in with the shadows and the dark fabric of the interior.

  “There,” Mia said, pointing to the glove. “You can barely see it, but the bottom looks like yellow leather, just like the one you found at the scene. The rest of the glove is dark.”

  “It’s a bloody glove,” Gray said quietly. “Nice work, Perez.”

  She flushed attractively. “That’s what I’m here for, right?”

  Gray smiled at her. He could nearly read the arrest warrant. He straightened. “We’ve got probable cause. Let’s open this thing.”

  * * *

  Kate’s heart beat into her throat with every sound. Outside of the basement window, she could hear vehicles as they went speeding past and watch the shadows of pedestrians pass through the light. She wasn’t in some remote location. She was probably in a city suburb, and hundreds of people passed by this torture chamber every day. All day she’d done the only thing she could think of. She’d screamed. Now it was night, and she was once again in darkness. Her throat was raw and dry from her efforts, and look where that had gotten her.

  She had worn smooth the earthen floor around her with her pacing, dragging the chain on her ankles with her. The chain was secure; she’d clawed at the links, checking for rust and scratches, anything that might weaken it. It felt old and heavy, but the lock was solid.

  Since her voice had turned too hoarse to scream, she’d been calculating what she would do when he returned. She would have to surprise him, leap up from the floor and claw at his eyes, rip his hair from his scalp—whatever it took. Stick her finger in his eye and pop it out like a grape. The thought didn’t even turn her stomach. She was going to be fighting for her life.

  She lay down on the floor on her back, positioned to kick her captor in the knees when he came calling. Assuming he didn’t drug her first. She didn’t want to even think about that. There were no other options.

  The floors above her suddenly vibrated with sound and activity. After what felt like days of silence, there were people here. Kate jumped to her feet and screamed. Her throat felt as if it was bleeding, but she took one breath after another, screaming and rattling the chains at her ankles. All the time, footsteps pounded back and forth above her, but no one answered.

  What if there were more of them? What if he wasn’t the only one? The thoughts wrapped around her lungs. Here she’d been trying to signal them, when maybe they had come to kill her.

  She was on her hands and knees, fumbling on the floor, digging frantically for anything she could use as a weapon and coming up empty-handed, when the stairs began to creak. Her heart halted; her breath stalled. Now was the time to fight.

  She had a five-foot chain on her ankles. She would take him down and wrap it around his neck. Then all she had to do was squeeze.

  She lay on the floor as if she were asleep as the footsteps creaked closer. Her muscles were tight as coils, ready to spring when the time came. There was a pounding on the door and muffled shouting. Then heavy slams of metal on metal. Someone was breaking down the door.

  She held her hands over her ears, wincing, her heart skittering across her chest. She would fight back an army if she had to. She wouldn’t go down.

  Then a stream of light. A male voice shouted, “Police!”

  The light fell on her face and she tried to say “I’m here,” but no words came out. Her throat was too raw.

  Blinded by the light, she was aware of people streaming into the room, and the floor shook with their footsteps. Someone touched her arm, and she flinched. “Kate? It’s okay. We’re going to get you out of here.” He knelt beside her, keeping one hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “My ankles,” she managed in a raspy voice, pointing to the cuts and scabs.

  Her eyes were adjusting to the light. She saw him look down where she’d pointed and then shout over his shoulder, “I need a blanket, and someone needs to cut these chains.�
�

  Kate felt dazed. Her lips started moving. “I thought...I thought...”

  “Shh,” he said. “You’re safe now.”

  I thought I was going to die here. He was keeping her propped up, his arms supporting the weight of her upper body. She glanced at his name tag. D’Augostino. Weak with relief and exhaustion, she slumped back against his arms, leaned her heavy head against his shoulder and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Chapter 12

  Morrison was ready to go. Gray had watched him downing cans of energy drink while he waited for Valentine to be booked. He had a twitch in his right eye and a tic in his left hand, and he was pacing the hall outside of the interrogation room. He looked up when he saw Gray and Mia approaching. “Hey, Lieutenant. I get to go in, right? I want a chance at this prick.”

  “Calm down, Morrison, or I’m going to throw you into a cold shower.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “You’ll get to go in, but no theatrics. I don’t want this guy to lawyer up if we can help it. You need to be cool.”

  “Okay, fine.” His mouth turned downward in slight disappointment. Then he was back on track, his jaw set, shaking his head. “Freaking Valentine, Lieutenant. We got him, man.” He drained the last of his energy drink. “Be right back.” He exited the room and left Gray and Mia standing alone.

  “He needs more caffeine,” Gray said.

  Mia arched an eyebrow. “Seems to me he’s already had too much.”

  Gray watched Mia, trying not to be obvious in his concern. He’d offered to take her somewhere to get some rest, but she’d refused. They’d been operating on pure adrenaline all day, and since they’d opened that truck and found the other bloody glove, they’d both become much too invested to take a break. Even if Mia was no longer an official consultant on the case, Gray’s colleagues didn’t suggest she leave. Not now. They knew Mia, and they understood what Valentine had taken from her, and as long as she stayed out of the way, Gray knew no one would push her out.

  She had been unusually quiet, but her bright eyes were alert. She was fixated on the empty interrogation room. “When will he come in?”