The Murder of Janessa Hennley

by Victor Methos

  “Mick, it’s Steve. I got that trace you wanted. I’m emailing all the info now.”

  “Great. We got a hit, then?”

  “Yup. Sixteen white vans with owners over sixty registered in Florida. Had the interns track fifteen of ’em down. That leaves one unaccounted for.”

  “Who?”

  “Harold Ricks. But it’s only been three hours; he might just not have gotten around to returning our calls. I did get in touch with his mom, who said he was on trip. But she couldn’t say if it was in state or out.”

  “Do me a favor, Steve. Send me his criminal history, would you?”

  “Already in the email, bro.”

  “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “No worries.”

  Angela carried out a bowl of ice cream hosed down with chocolate syrup.

  “You’re missing out,” she said.

  He opened the email from Steve from the Bureau’s tech division. “I’m getting a stomachache just watching you.”

  She shrugged and shoved another spoonful in her mouth.

  Harold David Ricks was sixty-seven years old and worked as a bus driver part-time in a suburb of Tallahassee. A note in his employment history said he had been terminated from his job four months ago, though it didn’t say why. Mickey flipped through his credit history and then located his criminal convictions and arrests.

  His career outside the law began when he was fifteen and convicted of petty theft. The probable cause statement from the information, the document used to file charges against him, said he had stolen food from the cafeteria at school.

  From there, the episodes grew in frequency. Mickey had seen this before. A kid did something stupid or horrible, and the state placed them in juvenile detention. A place where they learned their craft, everything from how to hotwire cars to avoiding the cops. Inmate-on-inmate sexual assault was common as well, though people talked even less about it than in the adult jails and prisons. The child went in a normal kid that made a mistake, and came out a lifelong criminal.

  At a young age, Harold racked up everything relating to theft. They locked him up for three years in the Union Correction Institution on a car theft. A major gap in his history followed his parole only two months later. Mickey checked the dates: no criminal charges from 1971 to 1975.

  Mickey scrolled down to the last known addresses, and his heart dropped. His final identified place of residence was listed in Gainesville, Florida. But the place prior was in Raiford, Iowa. In Madison County. A house under his mother’s name. Prior to that was an apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  “We need to go. Now.”

  “Where?” she said, working around a dollop of ice cream.

  He jumped into the driver’s seat and opened the door for her. Handing her his cell phone with one hand, he started the car with the other. “Call Detective Toby Miller at the sheriff’s office and tell him to meet us at that address. The first one.”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell him there’s someone there he’ll really want to meet.”

  10

  The house, located next to an apartment building, appeared like every other house in the neighborhood. Because of who Mickey surmised lived there, however, it adopted a gloomy and ominous veneer. Dark blinds hung over the bay windows. The door, its locks rusted and old, was white with chipping paint.

  He crossed the lawn to the front door. He knocked and rang the doorbell, and waited a beat before doing it again.

  “No one’s home,” Angela said. “Oh, well.” She cocked her leg back as though she was going to kick the door.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m entering the home of the suspect.”

  “For what reason? Because he lived in the same counties murders took place in? That’s not probable cause.”

  “He’s got a white van.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. That’s what you said. Why are you questioning me?”

  “Because if we go barging in there without probable cause, anything we find is fruit of the poisonous tree. It’ll all be tossed at a motion hearing.”

  She sighed. “How long to get a warrant?”

  “We can apply for an e-warrant and have it in less than half an hour.”

  “Half an hour? He could be gone by then.”

  “We’ll just sit out here. Anyone comes in or out, we’ll see.”

  “Well, what if I heard someone scream inside?”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “But maybe I did?” She folded her arms.

  “But you didn’t. Angela, all you have is your reputation. Never ruin it over one case.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  Mickey was two steps away from the front porch when glass shattered behind him. Angela had broken out the window next to the door.

  “Oops.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I told you not to—”

  “You can write me up later, Mickey. I’m not letting him get away.”

  “You just made sure he will.”

  “I heard a scream.”

  “Angela—”

  “You gonna stand there and argue with me, or come in?” They stared at each other before she stuck one leg through the window and climbed inside.

  The door opened, and she stood by with her arms folded, waiting. Mickey glanced around the street, though he didn’t know whom he expected to see. He walked up the porch steps and entered the house.

  The front room was dark. Paint or opaque blinds blacked out all the windows. A set of wooden stairs led up to the second floor. Down the hall, Mickey could see a kitchen and several doors off to the side. He brushed past Angela and checked the first door. It was unlocked. A bedroom.

  “I don’t think anybody’s home,” she said.

  “I thought you heard a scream?”

  “I thought I did, too.”

  A single bed with no sheets occupied each identical bedroom. No decorations, clothing, or photos.

  In the filthy kitchen, Angela covered her nose. “This is disgusting,” she said.

  A sink full of dishes was the likely origin, along with a full garbage can. Rotted food crusted the dishes. A gray refrigerator rested against the wall. He opened it, and it contained a large, blue wedding cake and nothing else.

  “Holy shit,” she said behind him, staring at the cake.

  A scream, coming from somewhere inside the house. The two of them looked at each other and withdrew their sidearms.

  “I got upstairs,” Angela said, running out of the kitchen.

  Mickey searched a bathroom down the hall and then opened two more doors near the front room. Just empty closets. Mickey tried to open a door behind the staircase, but it was locked. He placed his ear against it and listened.

  “Hello?” he shouted.

  A muffled scream.

  He cocked back and slammed his heel into the door just under the doorknob. The old, flimsy door nearly fell off its hinges. A set of weak wooden stairs led down into a basement. Mickey kept his back to the wall, his sidearm held low, as he took the stairs. At the bottom, he spotted a young woman strapped to a chair. Her wrists were bleeding, and she was nude.

  “Help me! Please!”

  “You’re going to be okay. I need to clear this basement before I can get you out, okay?”

  “No! No, please. Get me out. Get me out!”

  Mickey forced himself to ignore her. He walked the length of basement but saw no one. He cleared the few hiding spaces. No additional doors and only two windows, painted black.

  The girl was screaming. He holstered his weapon and scanned the basement for anything sharp. The ropes around her wrists, knotted so tightly he couldn’t undo them, were rubbing the skin off.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stephanie.”

  “Stephanie, I don’t have anything to cut through these ropes. Did you ever see a knife anywhere down here?”

  “No. He doesn’t
show me anything.”

  “Okay, well, the police are on their way, and when they get here I think we’re going to have to find a knife. I’m going to go check where the police are and call the fire department.”

  “No! Please don’t leave me here. Please. Don’t leave, don’t leave.”

  “Okay, it’s okay, calm down, calm down. I’m not going to leave you, okay? My partner is upstairs. I’m just going to go call out to her. All right? Say all right.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He walked to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, “Angela?”

  Within a few seconds she appeared at the top of the stairs. “What’d you find?”

  “A girl tied to a chair. We need paramedics. And throw down a blanket and a knife from the kitchen.”

  “On it.”

  Angela reappeared a moment later holding a white quilt. She threw it down to him.

  “No silverware in the kitchen,” she said.

  Mickey put the quilt over Stephanie. He pulled a nearby chair over and sat in it. He tried to assess her injuries.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For having to look.”

  She was sniffling. “Thanks for the blanket.”

  “You’re welcome.” He turned the chair so he wasn’t staring right at her. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I don’t know. He comes and goes.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Older guy with a beard. He wears glasses sometimes.”

  “Has anyone else ever come down here?”

  “No, just him.”

  Mickey took in the basement. “I’m sorry you had to go through this.”

  Sirens sounded on the street. Mickey walked to one of the windows and opened it. Several police cruisers and an ambulance parked outside.

  Stephanie began to cry again. Mickey wished he had the words to comfort her, that he could say a few things and take away the pain and humiliation. But nothing came to mind, so instead, he gazed out the window until the fire truck arrived a couple minutes later.

  “They’re here.”

  The firemen inspected the ropes. The younger of the two said the ropes were extra thick, but a bolt cutter should do it. A minute later one of the firemen walked down the stairs with a bolt cutter and snapped off the ropes. Stephanie collapsed into the arms of a paramedic. They put her on a stretcher, stabilized her neck, and asked her a series of questions as they examined her body. Then they carried her up the stairs. Mickey was left standing with Detective Miller, Angela, and a uniformed officer.

  “Who is this guy?” Miller said.

  “Harold Ricks. I think we need to clear the patrol cars and ambulance as quickly as possible and have a team set up inside for the takedown. Do you have a SWAT team?”

  “SWAT team? You ain’t in New York, Agent Parsons. We’re a small town. You got me and you got Officer Traj over there. I can get a few more uniforms down here, too.”

  “Get as many as you can. When we surprise him, he’s going to fight.”

  11

  He rented the empty apartment for less than two hundred dollars a month. The space was small and quiet, and the neighbors kept to themselves. It was the perfect place for Harold Ricks to go to for a few hours each day and be by himself.

  He would lie on a sleeping bag on the floor and stare at the ceiling until falling asleep. Sometimes he brought a woman up here, whomever he happened to pick up from a bar, and they smoked pot and talked late into the night.

  Harold stood at the window and stared down at his house. Paramedics brought out on a stretcher the girl he’d had in his basement and loaded her into an ambulance. Such a shame.

  Several people were talking on the porch. Two of them definitely weren’t local. One was a woman in a suit with tanned legs. The other was an older man with his hands on his hips.

  Harold lifted his binoculars. A badge clung to the woman’s hip. He moved his line of sight over to the older man. The man’s suit coat was off and his sleeves were rolled up. On the right forearm, Harold recognized something he could never forget. A POW/MIA tattoo. The shading was dark. It portrayed a man with his head lowered and a water tower behind him. Underneath the illustration read the words, “You Are Not Forgotten.”

  Vietnam.

  The memory transported Harold to a dark jungle in the night. The smell of long grass and mud permeated his skin and clothes. His feet so wrinkled from the constant dampness they appeared like large, white raisins.

  He lowered the binoculars.

  Mickey sat on the couch in the front room. Detective Miller fidgeted across from him on a sofa, and Angela and the uniformed officer were in the kitchen. Two other officers waited across the street in unmarked cars. Two more stood on either side of the front door. Mickey and Detective Miller positioned themselves away from the windows. They couldn’t be seen from outside.

  Mickey glanced into the kitchen. Angela chewed on a granola bar. The officer was flirting with her, and she was flirting back.

  “She’s a cutie,” Miller said.

  “She’s got guts. More than me, I think. I’m nervous it’s going to get her in trouble.”

  “You don’t believe in guts?”

  “We need guts, but we need brains more.”

  “Shoot, that’s pussy talk. You got guts, you don’t need nothin’ else.”

  Mickey didn’t say anything. He had known men like Toby Miller in Vietnam. They were usually the first ones killed.

  “So, how’d you fall into becoming a cop?” he asked.

  “We makin’ small talk, Agent Parsons?”

  “I’m happy to sit here in silence, if you prefer. But I’d like to know more about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think there’s any need for us to be hostile to each other. We both want the same thing.”

  “You don’t know shit ’bout what I want.”

  Mickey was silent a moment. “You’ve been burned before by the Bureau, haven’t you?”

  He sneered. “Well, you’re just a regular Sherlock Holmes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Child porn bust. Biggest in the county. Hell, probably biggest in the state. You feds come in here and tell me you can help. That all your resources are available to me if I want ’em. That you ain’t here to interfere. See, the County Attorney, he wanted that case for himself. But the U.S. Attorney threatened to do a double prosecution. Ain’t that just the shit? You can be tried in state court and then in federal court for the same crime. Don’t make no sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. So what happened then?”

  “The County Attorney and the U.S. Attorney reached some deal. They’d prosecute in federal court and bring in the County Attorney as a special prosecutor. Swear him in to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and everything. But that ain’t what went down. What went down is the FBI took over my investigation, made the arrests, and the U.S. Attorney prosecuted the case so damn fast no one out here even heard ’bout it. Reached a plea deal with the sonsabitches. Ten years a piece. And guess what? It was his face on all the channels. The U.S. Attorney. Got some commendation or some shit for it, too.”

  “I’m sorry that happened. But I’ve been burned by local law enforcement more times than I can count, and I don’t hold that against you. You didn’t do that to me. So as far as I’m concerned, you and me start fresh. I was hoping you would extend me the same courtesy.”

  He shrugged. “Look, you don’t seem like such a bad guy, but it ain’t in my nature to like just anybody from the federal government.”

  “You don’t have to like me. You just have to trust me.”

  Miller pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He offered one to Mickey, who didn’t smoke but took it just the same.

  “You asked me how I became a cop. I came back from the service, and all my buddies went into the police academy. It’s similar. Brotherhood and guns, I guess. Same feeling to it.”

  “What branch?”

  “T
enth Mountain out of Fort Drum. Army. Shit, though, when I was in all I could do was dream ’bout gettin’ out. Then when I got out I got a job ’cause it was similar to it.”

  “It sneaks up on you that way.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” He puffed his cigarette. “So lemme ask you, how’d you become a fed?”

  “I was a lawyer. I didn’t like it and wanted something else. It really just fell into my lap.”

  “And of all them divisions they got, organized crime and pornography and all that, you chose this? Huntin’ down murderers?”

  “Thought I could do some good, I guess.”

  “Well, we ain’t got but one murder every five or so years out here. But I’ll tell ya, you chase that dragon, you better make sure you don’t turn into one.”

  Mickey took a drag from the cigarette. He remembered the taste, even though he hadn’t had one in over thirty years. He wanted to cough but knew Miller wouldn’t respect him for it, so he suppressed it and went to the bathroom instead.

  The night dragged on slowly. The two officers by the door fell asleep around midnight. Everyone had to sit in the dark. The house was settling for the night, and creaking noises burst out of the walls or floors.

  Miller was snoring on the couch, but Mickey couldn’t sleep. Neither could Angela, who had paced the house for over an hour. She had disappeared. Mickey rose to check on her.

  Two bedrooms on this floor were empty. He looked in the kitchen. The deputy was sitting at the table, trying to read a paperback novel by candlelight.

  “Where’s Agent Listz?” Mickey said.

  “She snuck out for a minute.”

  “Snuck out?”

  “Just through the backyard there. No one saw her.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Just said she needed some air.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  He shrugged. “Long time, I guess.”

  12

  Mickey waited impatiently in the kitchen, then went out into the hall and sat on the floor. He checked the time on his cell phone. It was a quarter past two in the morning. Everyone in the house was asleep now, except for him and the deputy in the kitchen.