The Good Son: A Suspense Thriller (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 2)

by Dustin Stevens

  Being resolute was easy though when he was tucked away in the back of the store. There was no temptation before him, trying to garner his attention, teasing him to take one step back across the line. As long as he was out of the way he could do the right thing. He was free from hearing his mother’s words in his ears, didn’t have to think about her repeated challenges causing him to prove his love for her.

  “Please,” Cindy said, tears beginning to pool on the underside of her eyes. “Ten minutes, tops.”

  The clenching in The Good Son’s stomach ceased as he watched the tears hang from her bottom eyelashes. The resentment he felt toward his mother, his innate desire to be left alone, both bled away, seeing only a person in need before him.

  There was no way he could ever rectify the things he had done. His only hope, now and forever, was to return to the person he was before, to live well, and hope that others viewed what he did through the necessary lens.

  As much as he hated the thought, that had to begin with moments like this.

  “Sure, Cindy,” The Good Son said, nodding once before pushing himself to his feet. “Take all the time you need.”

  For a moment it looked like Cindy might rush in and hug him.

  “Go,” he whispered, jutting his chin toward the employee restroom in the back of the building, “before Beauregard sees you.”

  Without a word, Cindy pivoted and took off down the aisle, her short legs almost sprinting as she made the corner and disappeared from sight. The Good Son waited until she was gone before letting out a sigh and beginning his slow trudge toward the front.

  Things were getting out of control. What had begun as a very clear plan with a finite directive had spiraled badly. He was ready to let things go, but it wasn’t that simple. It never was. And now it threatened to get even worse.

  The thought hung over The Good Son like a personal rain cloud, following him the length of the store as he took his place behind the register, a man on the cusp of 50 waiting patiently in line.

  “Sorry about that,” The Good Son said, calling the register to life. “Lunchtime, lot of shuffling going on.”

  He offered a small smile, hoping the lie would stick, but the man just waved it off.

  “No worries,” he said. “I just got up here myself.”

  One at a time, the man unloaded some garden decorations and work gloves onto the conveyor, The Good Son ringing each up in turn. “That’ll be $27.48 with tax, sir.”

  Starting with his shirt and moving to the front of his jeans, he patted every pocket he had. His face fell flat for an instant as he turned toward the parking lot, the slightest hint of color flushing his cheeks. “Oh my, I seem to have misplaced the money my wife gave me.”

  Again he ran a hand over each pocket before reaching to his backside and extracting a battered leather wallet, the letters PNT punched into it with an old fashioned branding tool.

  “Do you take MasterCard?

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The meeting with Cleary left Reed with a bitter aftertaste. The complete disinterest she had shown about the passing of her ex-husband was appalling. The manner in which she had referred to his ailment, the fact that she had the temerity to ask about a will, was on a different level entirely.

  Seated behind the steering wheel, Reed drove with his left hand, his right clenched into a tight fist. He raised it once and swung it downward like an oversized hammer, the ball of it aimed at the middle console, stopping just millimeters from making contact. With his teeth gritted, he repeated the motion twice more, each one coming even closer to connecting with the console, until on the third he tapped the side of his hand against the smooth plastic, a crescent of sweat left behind.

  People like the killers he was currently investigating were easily the worst part of his job. They leveled pure and indiscriminate hatred, taking people like Esther Rosen long before their normal expiration date. They committed the worst of sins and seemed to do them for no more concrete reason than the fact that they could.

  Coming in a close second were people like Bethanee Cleary. Void of any compassion, they saw the world entirely through a set of very narrow, very self-serving lenses. Not only did they make his job of apprehending others harder, they made him seriously question why he did it in the first place.

  That feeling, wondering if it all was worth it, was something he could not abide. He could not allow himself to harbor such thoughts, and he damn sure wouldn’t allow someone like Bethanee Cleary to put them there.

  “Okay, so that was a dead end,” he said out loud, his voice pulling Billie up into the rearview mirror behind him.

  It was obvious Cleary had nothing to do with Ruggles’s murder. She was too cavalier to be hiding anything, offering up an alibi without provocation. If Reed really felt vindictive he could press the matter and check it for corroboration, but the exercise would accomplish little beyond making him feel better by lashing out at her.

  Right now he just didn’t have the time for it.

  Drifting over a lane on the freeway, Reed exited toward Franklinton. His gaze fixed on the sign along the roadway as he drove past, the six inch white letters on a green background, watching as they slid past his vision and fell from sight.

  “Franklinton,” he whispered aloud, his hands directing the car toward his destination through muscle memory. Some fraction of the aggravation he felt at Cleary fell away, or was at least moved to the side, as he let the single word play across his thoughts.

  There was something there. It was tenuous, ethereal even, just beyond his grasp, but his mind refused to let it go.

  “Franklinton,” he repeated. “Not The Bottoms. Why the hell are we looking at a string of murders and assaults miles from the worst part of the city?”

  Envisioning the misshapen grid of the 8th Precinct jurisdiction, Reed knew the entire region was technically named Franklinton, though the vast majority of it was spliced off into The Bottoms subsection. That was where most of the crime – robberies, assaults, vandalism, even murders – usually took place. In his six months with the new department, four days prior was the first time he had ever taken a call in the surrounding neighborhoods.

  From what he could tell, they were almost all alike, cookie cutter streets with residential dwellings. They were on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale for sure, the kinds of homes that would never be seen in the northern suburbs, but they certainly weren’t government housing projects. They were inhabited by people like Ira Soto, folks who were making the best of a bad situation.

  People who rarely, if ever, ran afoul of the law.

  “Somebody’s trying to tell us something,” Reed said, again glancing into the rearview mirror, seeing the twin spires of Billie’s black ears. “The crime scenes might be clean, but...”

  Pausing to allow a car to turn out of the precinct parking lot, Reed leaned across the passenger seat. He extended his upper body over the expanse of the car and reached into the pocket on the inside of the passenger door, going by feel until he found what he was looking for and drew it up beside him. Once he had it, he turned into the station, going straight for the back of the parking lot.

  There he jammed the gear shift into park, leaving the engine running.

  The map was one he’d gotten from a local gas station when he first moved over. Despite working just north of Franklinton for more than a decade, he and Riley had both made a point to stay far away from the area as much as possible. They had their own cases to work. They did not need to be seeking out even worse cases to the south.

  The first month in this precinct Reed had left the map on the passenger seat beside him, checking the street names for every call that came in. With time, the place become as familiar as his old beat had been, the map getting folded up and stowed away.

  It was the first time Reed had it out in the better part of five months, the creases and corners a little frayed, though otherwise still in pretty good shape. He unfurled it to full size, allowing the breadth of it t
o extend across most of the car, the air from the vents causing it to sway in front of him. He left it there just long enough to get a clear look at what he needed before folding it in half and then the remainder in half again, focusing his attention on the western quarter of the precinct.

  Billie’s cool nose passed against his right triceps, her face emerging beside him. Raising his arm at the shoulder, Reed rubbed against her neck twice before opening the middle console and extracting a pen.

  “Okay,” he said, thinking out loud. “This is where Henry Ruggles lived.”

  Reed traced along Water Street, finding the corresponding intersection and circling it. A bold line of blue ink appeared as Reed moved on to the dog park where Ruggles’s body had been found. “And this is where he was dumped.”

  The two locations were no more than an inch apart, the second site north-northwest of the first. For a moment Reed stared down at them, his gaze passing over the web of streets, at the labyrinth of parks and schools and public works all listed on the map, hoping for something to jump out at him.

  Nothing did.

  “It’s not enough,” Reed said, looking down at the two indiscriminate points. Even working with just a fraction of the overall jurisdiction, there was still too much space for a pair of locations to reveal anything. “Unless...”

  Moving two inches north of the dog park, Reed found the address for Esther Rosen. He circled it as well, his heart rate picking up a tiny bit, a clear pattern starting to emerge. In short order, he pushed his gaze further north still, the site for Ira Soto completing the quartet.

  What had been too few was now too much to ignore.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “What time are Greene and Gilchrist on tonight?”

  The question was directed to Lou at the dispatch desk, the first stop Reed made upon entering the precinct. His sudden appearance, a solid black wolf look-alike by his side, startled the man so bad Reed thought he was on the verge of a heart attack. He raised a hand to his chest and gasped.

  It took a full minute for the man to catch his breath, for his heart rate to slow down so he could speak, for the sideways glances from the opposite side of the room to cease coming their way.

  “6:00,” Lou said. “They’re working a double tonight, covering for some guys who are going out of town for the weekend.”

  Glancing up at the plain black and white clock on the wall, Reed nodded. Their arrival was still a few hours off. He needed to know if they had found anything at Ruggles’s home, if their canvas had revealed the slightest bit of useful information, but he still had plenty to keep him busy until then.

  “Thanks,” Reed said, slapping the desk twice as he departed.

  The look on Lou’s face relayed Reed could feel free not to stop by again anytime soon.

  Reed led Billie back in the opposite direction. He could tell they were garnering attention, his gaze not once wavering as he cut straight through the desks and jerked his chair back.

  He dropped down into it without ceremony, pushing his stomach up against the edge of the desk and lifting his phone. Just as fast he dropped the receiver on the desk and dialed a number, reading it from the list of contacts in his cell-phone, before picking it up and pressing it to his ear.

  He counted off three rings before it was answered, the first response nothing but heavy breaths on the other side.

  “Bishop,” a voice finally said, annoyance, agitation, plain.

  “Bishop, Reed Mattox,” Reed opened, pausing to allow the man on the other side to register who was calling and hopefully drop some of the angst. Right now they were still in mid-shift and he could picture him riding shotgun, covering his phone and mouthing Reed’s name to Iaconelli behind the wheel.

  “Hey, Detective, what can I do for you?” Bishop said, a faux joviality barely surfacing.

  Reed let it go without offense, knowing he would react the same way to a call from either one of them. “That assault case you guys got handed, anything come of it?”

  A moment passed, nothing audible over the phone but the noise of a car in motion. Reed considered adding more to the inquiry, filling in some of the blanks, letting them know why he was asking, but ultimately decided not to. He knew the pause had nothing to do with the details of the case, everything stemming from the silent discussion they were having about how much to share.

  “First thing,” Bishop said, “it wasn’t an assault. She died less than an hour after arrival, bumping it to murder.”

  Reed cradled the phone between his shoulder and ear, scribbling down the information. Grimes had mentioned a fourth murder during the TV interview, but Reed had been so wrapped up in his own two cases, he had failed to equate that with the assault Bishop and Iaconelli had handled.

  “Woman’s name was Sandy Jurgensen,” Bishop said. “Home address is listed as Hilliard, meaning she’s outside our jurisdiction.”

  “But she was brought to Franklinton Memorial?” Reed asked, trying to picture the exact location.

  “Yeah,” Bishop said. “She was from the south end of town, lived beyond the outer belt, maybe five miles from the hospital.”

  Keeping the phone wedged tight, Reed rose and pulled the map from his back pocket. He peeled back the quarter he’d been working from and unfolded it to include more of the surrounding area. Rising to his feet, he leaned forward and used one finger to guide his search.

  Not until a fat bead dripped from the end of his nose and landed inside the circle of Esther Rosen’s house did he even realize he was sweating.

  “Still,” he said, “There must be two or three other health facilities closer than that.”

  “We know,” Bishop said, a sigh plain in the two-word response. “Been a hell of a lot easier if the killer had taken her to one of those, or if she had lived in Franklinton. As is, the whole damn thing has turned into a jurisdictional pissing match.”

  Reed continued to let his gaze move over the area Bishop had mentioned, seeing it fall well outside the outline of the 8th domain on his map. “I bet.”

  “Actually, you have no idea,” Bishop replied. “Why? You got something?”

  Reed remained silent. He took up a pen and marked the Franklin Memorial Hospital, the new black orb falling directly in the center of the crescent formed by the four blue circles.

  Pressing both palms flat on the desk on either side of the map, Reed stared straight down at the page, letting his vision grow blurry until only the five circles remained, a pattern so obvious it was almost infuriating.

  “I’ll be son of a...” Reed muttered, blinking himself back into focus. As he did so the various lines and topographical features became sharper, the map returning to its previous state.

  “Why?” Bishop repeated. “You got something?”

  Rising to full height, Reed opened his mouth to speak, only to close it again. His mind raced, trying to put together everything he’d learned in the last few days, attempting to force some coherence before he plunged forward again.

  “Mattox!” Bishop snapped on the end of the line, jerking Reed from his thoughts. He flinched slightly before grabbing the receiver with his hand and pressing it to his mouth.

  “How long are you guys on tonight?” Reed asked, ignoring Bishop’s question.

  “6:00, why?” Bishop asked, his annoyance rising with each passing moment.

  “Meet me here at 5:30,” Reed said, smashing the phone down before the man had a chance to respond. He held the receiver down a split second, just long enough to cut the connection, before taking it up a second time. Any longer and he knew Bishop would call right back, trying to get more information, most likely not being real subtle about his feelings on the matter.

  The second number he dialed from memory, hoping with everything he had that the person on the other end would answer.

  To his surprise, she did.

  “Reed Mattox here. I need a favor.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The call was a bit premature, but Reed knew th
at if he were going to set something up, he had to put things in motion now, even if it meant skipping a few administrative details. If anything turned up in the meantime to prove his theory wrong, it would be easier to cancel than try to get started later at a moment’s notice.

  Plus, in 12 years of police work, Reed had learned it was easier to say sorry than ask for permission.

  The person on the other end of the line was Dr. Solomon, Reed just catching her during the tail end of a patient write- up. Another five minutes and she would have been back in the lab, inaccessible for the duration of her current autopsy.

  It was apparent from the tone of her voice that she had been expecting him to call, her own suppositions working much faster than his. Unhampered by multiple cases and outside considerations, she had been able to strip things away and view just what was before her. While that was a luxury Reed could not afford, it was one that in this instance was looking more and more like the correct path.

  It took less than five minutes for Reed to outline what he was considering. Halfway through she picked up on it, the two of them going back and forth, filling in bits and pieces, thinking out loud. By the time they were done, Reed didn’t even need to ask for the favor, Solomon already knowing what came next and agreeing to set things up.

  The moment they were finished, Reed went into the DMV databank and pulled the licenses for Esther Rosen, Ira Soto, and Sandy Jurgensen. He didn’t bother with Henry Ruggles, already aware of how he fit in, his license unable to add any new information.

  Each of the three licenses appeared in a separate window on his computer, Reed minimizing their dimensions so they overlapped. Lined up in row, the reality of the situation appeared so simple, so clear, so obvious now that he knew what to look for. And yet it would have been so easy to miss it if Solomon had never examined Ruggles, he might still be wandering around, hoping for something to jump out at him.