by Dale Mayer
“It’s not,” she cried out forcefully. “Do you know how much that little boy could be suffering right now?”
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve tried,” he said, and he hung up.
He tossed the phone onto his couch and stared out the window. He’d tried, but he hadn’t tried everything. He bowed his head, fighting against the forces pushing against him. It’s almost as if he heard his grandmother’s voice in the background, repeating something she had said many times.
You must do something, or it will crush you.
Even growing up as a young boy, she had warned him, “The more you turn your back on your talent,” she said, “the more it will rise up against you. Eventually it will crush you. There will come a time in your life when you must decide to go one way or the other.”
And he heard that same voice in the background say, That time is now. You must decide.
Chapter 16
Fourth Monday in June, Morning
The next morning Kate stared at her board, her hands in her pockets, as she studied the various markings. The lines bothered her. She turned to look at Rodney. “What about the Integrated Child Exploitation Unit?” she asked.
“What about ICE?”
“I wonder if they’d seen anything like this.”
He lifted his head and looked at her, looked at the photos. “The mark?”
She nodded.
“Ask. It’s a good idea. Should have done that right off.”
She nodded, walked to her desk, and sat down. Dennis, at ICE, answered the phone on the first ring. She quickly explained who she was and why she was calling.
“So, you have a dead pedophile you think might be connected somehow to a bunch of dead children with a strange mark on the wrist?”
“Yes. But most of these are cold cases,” she said. “It occurred to me that maybe the marks have something to do with a sex ring. Or a sex trafficking site, club, or whatever these assholes call themselves these days.”
“Can you send me a copy of the images?”
“We’ve got the same base image,” she said, “with a couple minor differences. Some have additional lines on the side.” She quickly got his email address and sent a few files over to him, while they talked.
“If you open the first one,” she said, “that’s from fifteen years ago. The second one is from eight years ago, and the third is from the dead convicted pedophile we found Saturday,” she said.
He brought up the images on his end. “Interesting.”
“Interesting why?” she asked.
“Because it’s so faint,” he said. “It’s almost as if it’s some secret marker. Deliberately made so it’s hard to see.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said in a dry tone. “Something they would know but nobody else. So faint it would get missed in the autopsy.”
“I can take a look,” he said. “We generally focus on facial recognition, scars, body deformities, things like that. If this was bold with heavy black markings, we’d have noted it. As it is, it’s very faint.”
“I know,” she said, “but I just thought—”
“It’s a good thought,” he said, “a good find. I’ll get back to you.” And, with that, he was gone.
Rodney looked over at Kate. “And?”
“He’d never seen them before,” she said. “He’ll get back to me.”
“There really could be a possible connection.”
“Who else can access a ring like that?” she wondered out loud. “Is there some online chat room or somewhere these psychos go?”
“Lots of them,” Rodney said. “The dark web is full of that shit.”
“I want to go to Ken’s place. Forensics should be through with it.” She hopped to her feet, looked over at Rodney, and asked, “You up for it?”
He grabbed his jacket and said, “Always up for a road trip.”
“It’s not all that far away from here,” she said, “maybe fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll drive,” he said. Within minutes they were outside and in his car.
As they pulled up in front of the townhome, she whistled. “He wasn’t terribly broke if he was living here.”
“He was subleasing. The cops have been through the place already, as have we. You didn’t get to go through it, did you?”
“No,” she said. “Does forensics have the laptop?”
“They do.”
She walked inside the townhome and stopped in the living room and stared. “It’s so perfectly neat.”
“He lived alone.”
“Did he though?” Her gaze caught on some grime on the wall. She shifted closer, saw a bunch of smudge marks, but they were only like thirty inches high. She pointed them out down the hallway. “Look. It’s almost like a child rubbed his hands all the way along the wall here.”
Rodney squatted in front of her. “It’s hardly a spot where an adult would touch, is it? But it lends credence to our theory.”
“But,” she said, taking a devil’s advocate point of view, “he also could have dragged something or been carrying something. We’ll have to keep looking for answers.” Still, her mind was locked on the fact that something was off. But then again, it was the home of a pedophile, after all, so what the hell else should she expect? Some seriously ugly scenarios could have happened here. She wandered through the place slowly, checking and searching everything, until she got to the kitchen.
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“Nothing and everything,” she said. She quickly went through the kitchen and found absolutely nothing suspicious. She sighed and said, “What about the basement?”
“Just a crawl space for utilities,” he said.
“I want to go down there,” she said instantly.
He shrugged and said, “Whatever. It’s in the hallway here.” They opened up a panel on the floor, and she dropped down with her cell on Flashlight mode. This space was only about three feet high. She asked, “Did Forensics come in here?”
“Yep, they did,” Rodney said. He crouched again, so he saw where she was, had his flashlight shining down there too.
Kate saw all the utilities, pipes, and wires that kept the condo functional. As she searched around, she couldn’t see much else. She didn’t know what the hell she was looking for really, but at least maybe a scratch on the wall or something to show that a child had been here. There was nothing. She continued her search, tapping the walls for a hollow sound. “Nothing,” she said, disgusted, as she made her way back up.
“We do know how to do our job, you know?”
“So do I,” she snapped. She headed upstairs, where she went to the spare room, and found it completely clean and empty. Then she went into the master. And yet it too was nothing but plain and ordinary. She shot him a look. “What is it about this room that makes my skin crawl?”
He smiled and said, “I can see that it does. Maybe just the fact that he lived here. I don’t know.”
She quickly searched through the room, knowing that the Forensics Division had been here ahead of her, but she didn’t care. She studied the worn wall, wallpapered in some strange purple and gray pattern. She slid her hand across the top of the wall, and, when she snagged her fingernail ever-so-slightly, she stopped and moved back. Then, using her nail, she followed the indention, outlining a space about two feet by two feet. She pressed inward ever-so-gently and out popped the secret door.
“Now this is interesting,” she murmured.
Rodney was there instantly. “Well, I’m betting they didn’t find this,” he said in surprise. Behind it was a safe built into the wall. She looked at it, then turned to him. “You any good at this?”
“No,” he said. “We could get somebody in here.”
She nodded and frowned. “I could try anyway.” She placed her ear against it and slowly turned the dial, but she couldn’t make it open. “Damn it,” she said. “How long will it take to get somebody in here to open it?”
/> “Unless you know somebody,” he said, “we must bring in a locksmith.”
She swore again. Just then her phone lit up, and a text came in from Simon. She sucked in her breath at the string of numbers in front of her. Was it possible? How could he know? Against her better judgment, but unable to ignore the impulse, she tried the numbers on the safe. When she heard the tumblers fall into place and then a click, she stepped back, snapped the lever down, and pulled it open. And stared. In front of her were DVDs, old VHS tapes, and what looked like a photo album.
“What have we here?” Rodney asked, beside her.
She groaned. “What we have is a motherfucking sick society. I really don’t want to watch these videos.”
They stared at it all, knowing these would be videos nobody wanted them to see.
“We need Forensics in here,” he said. “A ton of fingerprints could be all over this stuff.”
“And yet Ken is dead, so what I want to know is who else knew this shit was here?”
“How did you open it?” he asked curiously. “Surely that was more than a guess.”
She lifted her phone in her hand and tapped the screen to open it up, so Rodney saw the text she had gotten from Simon.
Rodney stared at that, stared at her, and looked at the lock. “Holy shit. Call us Team Simon.”
*
Simon should have just shot himself. He didn’t know what the hell that was all about; he didn’t know where the numbers came from, and he didn’t know what the six numbers even meant. Too short to be a telephone number. But he knew that this had changed something forever. He stared at the phone in his hand and threw it down. It was fast becoming a habit with him.
He really wanted to throw it outside and forever shatter the window that linked him to this unknown world. But he also knew that this wouldn’t go away. He had reached this point of doing something that was right and doing that something right every damn time.
It had been two hours since he’d sent that text, and now he waited. Waited for the phone call that said the detective was downstairs. Finally it came.
“Send her up,” he said quietly. He didn’t even meet her at the elevator this time. When the elevator opened, he listened to the footsteps, grateful to hear only one set.
She walked to the couch, where he sat. “How did you know?”
He looked up at her, exhausted and drained. “I don’t even know what the numbers were for,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you did with them. I didn’t get any interpretation.”
“The numbers were the combination to open the safe of a pedophile,” she said quietly. “The same man who’s in the morgue.”
He stared at her in shock. “A safe?”
She nodded and didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” he whispered, “but I got a message in my head that you needed these numbers, and I sent them to you. See? I get numbers in my head all the time. It’s how I make money when gambling, buying stocks, investing in real estate. I’ve always called it intuition but this? … I don’t know what to call it.”
“I was staring at the safe, figuring out how to get into it,” she said, “and I was wondering what the numbers were, asking my team member to see if we could get a safecracker in, but wondering if we could get in faster before all that.”
“And it worked?” he asked. Then he gave a broken laugh, lifted his whiskey glass, and threw back the rest of it, his eyes closed again.
“How much of that have you had to drink?”
“Not nearly enough,” he said defiantly, and he opened his eyes and glared at her.
She smiled at him. “You know? I almost believe you.”
“Almost?”
“Almost,” she said. “Because that was a pretty smooth trick.”
“How else would I have known?” he said.
“I presume no one knows about your parlor trick?”
“Would you tell anyone?” he challenged.
She frowned and stared at the carpet.
“No way in hell you would let anybody know,” he snapped. “Your job would go out the window. The public would view you completely differently, and your privacy would be nonexistent. Do you have any idea how terrifying all this is?”
She raised her gaze and looked at him steadily.
He didn’t feel so much the center of her gaze as much as her deep sense of goodness.
“If you have answers,” she said, “you are honor bound to hand them over.”
He cracked up with laughter. “Honor bound?” he snapped. “Like fucking hell.”
“Do you think swearing makes a difference in my world?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why do you think your pretentious attitude makes any difference in mine?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think you’ve been struggling against who you truly are for a lifetime.”
He stopped and stared, her words echoing his grandmother’s. “Like hell,” he said, but he wasn’t ready to concede anything. He just glared at her.
She nodded slowly. “See? I don’t have any faith in what you do,” she said. “I’ve seen too many charlatans. Somebody took my mother to the cleaners and burned her for over fifty thousand dollars,” she said quietly, her gaze intent as she studied him. “At no point in time did that charlatan give her anything of value. What he gave my mother was the tiny glimmer of hope for what was an unreasonable expectation to begin with—the chance to contact my missing brother in the afterlife.”
He just nodded. “There is a segment of society,” he said, his voice just as quiet as hers, “who prey on the hopes, fears, and heartaches of others.”
“She ended up marrying him, and, by the time he died, the inheritance and trust fund her father had left was completely gone. She is still alive and in a very sad state right now,” she said. “So you should believe me when I tell you that I want you to be the charlatan, so I can throw your ass in the slammer.”
“Got it,” he said, his lips quirking but his gaze was steady.
“The fact of the matter is,” she said, “that you keep squirreling around in my cases, which is suspicious as hell. Rest assured, if I find you’ve overstepped,” she said, “I will do exactly as promised.”
He believed her. “So, I might be squirreling around in your cases,” he said, “but I don’t have the slightest idea why the information I’m getting has anything to do with them,” he said. “If I could find a way to get out of having this strange information, I would.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then gave a quick nod. “I think I believe you, but the thing is, I don’t have any way to justify these numbers.” She held up her cell phone and the string of numbers he’d texted her. He stared at them for a long moment. “I can’t really tell you how I got them either. I didn’t even know where you were at the time.”
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone where my partner and I were going, and that’s the part I really struggle with.”
“Maybe it’s more than either of us can imagine,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“And maybe it’s something completely unrelated to your cases and just some weird connection we have.”
“I don’t know.” She spun on her heels and headed to the elevator.
“Detective, you look tired,” he said.
She froze, then turned to look at him. “It’s hard to sleep when I know children are being abused, and I can’t stop it.”
“Is there something you can do about it?”
“I have to hope there is,” she said sorrowfully. “Otherwise, what am I doing with my life?” Her gaze deepened, as she stared at him. “Maybe that’s a question you should ask yourself,” she said. “What are you doing with your life?”
And, with that, she was gone.
He leaned back against the couch again and stared out the window. Trying to make amends. Not so much for his actions but for all those who had suffered too. Giving
to those who no longer believed that gifts, … hope, … happiness were possible any longer. That’s what he was doing. He’d been hoping against hope that what he was doing was enough. But based on what was happening right now, he wasn’t.
He still didn’t understand his connection to her or her cases because that was the thing. They were her cases—not these people—that he was connecting to. It was all about his connection to her cases, which ultimately meant his connection to her. And that was something he didn’t want at all. The last thing he needed was a cop in his life. Hell, the last thing he needed was anybody in his world, particularly somebody who would want something from him. But a cop, given his own lifestyle? Well, that was probably the worst-case scenario he could imagine yet.
Cursing, he poured another shot and threw back the whiskey, feeling the burn all the way. His grandmother’s voice came to him again. You can run, but you can’t hide.
*
Richmond. Everything was done in secret on the dark web. Anonymously. But where in Richmond? That was the secret. His group didn’t discuss addresses; they certainly didn’t exchange phone numbers. Anonymously online. Ken had mentioned a couple spots he used to hang out in. Spots that he himself had recognized. What he was doing now was finding some similar details from Nico’s past conversations. Anything, any message, any sign.
He went through everything that he ever had gotten from Nico. A couple photos of children. He kept trying to see locations, landmarks. One showed a McDonald’s, so he quickly mapped out all the McDonald’s locations in the Richmond area, trying to find one from that angle. He made one trip to Richmond and realized just how useless that would be, without more directions, more landmarks, more details.
If he could find that little girl, why should he pay money? Especially that kind of money? Nico shouldn’t have been so damn greedy. It’s not like he himself had any money. He used to have a lot of it but, well, not any longer. And that was pissing him off more and more every day. He had to get a little sneakier, a little more ingenious, on how to get through his month.
On his way back from Richmond, empty-handed, he pounded on the steering wheel. He parked at a coffee shop to use their Wi-Fi and quickly sent a message online, asking Nico if he’d reconsider. When there was no answer, he frowned. Then, getting a little trickier, he sent another message, saying he wanted proof of life, somewhere outside. Send me a picture of her at a park or someplace I can identify and know you didn’t Photoshop her in a scene.