The Scarlett Bell FBI Series

by Dan Padavona

  He parks in front of the garage, grabs the M82, and exits the running vehicle. The garage door is locked, so he puts his sleeved elbow through one of four small windows. Reaches in and pops the lock on the garage, then pulls the MKS in.

  Meeks kills the engine and pockets the keys. He shuts the garage and stands with his back to the door. Marvels at this stroke of luck.

  A dark checkerboard of backyards stretches into the gloaming. He runs through the grass and cuts behind an elm tree when a dog barks. Down the road, an officer with a bullhorn orders someone to back away from the blockade.

  A chain-link fence stands between Meeks and the next yard as the flashing lights of the police cars sweep red-and-blue lines across the houses. Leaning over the barrier, he lowers the rifle to the grass and immediately feels naked without it.

  Meeks sticks his foot between the links and pulls himself up. His palms are slick on the dewy metal, arms trembling under his weight as he fights to drag his leg over the fence. At the top, he loses his grip and tumbles over. Crashes back-first against the lawn. The air flies out of his chest and snuffs his ability to breathe.

  “Who’s there?”

  A woman. He lies still at the base of the fence with no cover nearby.

  The neighbor’s dog barks louder and yanks on its chain. Crawling up to his knees, Meeks edges along the fence, out of view of the porch.

  “There’s someone in the yard.”

  She draws an argument from a man, probably her husband, who tells her she’s hearing things and needs to come inside. The woman protests and steps down from the porch. She’s in the yard now. Meeks brings his eye to the M82’s scope as the husband raises his voice. Finally, she relents and goes inside. The door closes.

  While the way forward is clear, Meeks sprints through the darkest shadows of the yards and angles between trees. The thoroughfare into Milanville is visible beyond the neighborhood, the drone of engines like a gentle tide. Behind a ranch home, Meeks discovers two hockey goals set at opposite ends of the yard. A pair of sticks juts out from a hockey bag.

  Meeks quietly unzips the bag and removes the sticks. Tosses them into the dark and slides the M82 inside. A spider crawls down his arm, and he flicks it away.

  Voices travel from several houses behind. The police search the yards. Their flashlights slice through the night.

  Meeks tosses the bag over his shoulder and runs for the thoroughfare.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Damn, it felt chilly for September. Once the sun went down, the village outskirts became an icebox.

  Officer Picard skipped from one leg to the other and tried to stay warm. This was supposed to be his day off, but instead of spending the afternoon in the sun, he ended up stuck in meetings with Harrington, Ames, and those supposed experts from the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Presently, he should have been inside his warm living room. A cold beer and the ball game.

  And it was all because of some sicko with a rifle.

  Three vehicles impatiently waited at the roadblock with a fourth edging down the street. Their halogen lights beamed at his face and made him squint. It was going to be a long night.

  Yet Picard understood their frustration. Everyone was scared. Terrified. The murderer shot a teenage girl in their neighborhood. He couldn’t discern the faces inside the vehicles, not with the headlights in his eyes, but he guessed some were parents who wanted to get the hell out of the neighborhood and take their kids somewhere safe. Others had night jobs to get to. Or better places to be than a kill zone.

  It seemed even colder as he approached the first vehicle. A van of some sort. That was the thing about Southern California at summer’s end. It was blast-furnace-hot during the afternoon, but the cold after sundown was enough to remind him of autumns in Minnesota.

  Picard swept the flashlight across the windshield and saw one man in the driver seat. Not a family. That got him worried it was the shooter.

  The holstered gun lay against his hip. Picard hoped he wouldn’t need his weapon tonight.

  A horn honked behind the van. A man leaned his head out the window and asked Picard what the hell the hold up was.

  He ignored the other driver and slowly approached the van. The man inside was heavyset and bearded. His hands stayed on the steering wheel where they belonged, and that was good. Picard didn’t want trouble.

  Picard made a circular motion with his hand, and the driver reached for the power window control panel. Picard hated when their hands disappeared into the dark.

  The window descended with a whirring noise, and the man’s hands obediently returned to the steering wheel.

  “Evening, sir.”

  The man nodded.

  “Good evening.”

  “Where ya headed?”

  “LAX.” The man stole a glance at the dashboard clock. “My flight leaves in two hours.”

  Picard’s height allowed him to peer inside the van while he aimed the light at the seats and floor. A suitcase lay upon the back seat.

  “Where are you flying to, sir?”

  “New York. JFK. It’s my mother’s seventieth birthday tomorrow. I thought I’d better leave early. You know how the freeway is.”

  The man’s jowls nervously quivered when he spoke.

  “I sure do.”

  The evening chill worked in tandem with Picard’s anxiety. His legs ached and became stiff. Man, how he wanted this evening to be over. Tomorrow was his only remaining day off, and by God, he intended to spend the entire day at Manhattan Beach with a cooler of beer. To hell with the shooter and the FBI. Temperatures in the eighties sounded like heaven.

  “Sir, I need your license and registration.”

  “They’re in the glove compartment.”

  The man reached into the dark again, the part the officer hated. Picard angled the flashlight beam around the steering wheel and followed the driver’s hands. After the man slipped the license out of his wallet and handed over the registration, Picard compared the face on the license with the driver’s. A perfect match, right down to the hazel eyes and jowls. Timothy Burgess. The address read forty-six Linsdale. Everything appeared in order. He barely gave the registration card a glance before handing it back to Burgess.

  The van appeared clear, and this man didn’t fit the agents’ profile. But you could never be too careful, especially when one mistake put you face-to-face with a sniper rifle.

  “I’m gonna need to check the trunk.”

  The second driver beeped his horn again and yelled out his window. Picard beamed the flashlight at the man’s face. An embarrassed woman sat in the passenger seat.

  Burgess leaned his head out the window.

  “Is that necessary? Say, don’t you need a warrant for that?”

  Picard did.

  “Just a routine check. We can’t be too careful, you understand.”

  The man puffed air through his lips and eyed the clock again.

  “It won’t take more than a few seconds.”

  Picard made Burgess cut the engine and take the keys out of the ignition. This provoked all three vehicles behind Burgess to honk and flash their high beams. The burst of light left red imprints on Picard’s sight, and as his eyes cleared he saw a shadow move at the corner of his vision. He angled the light toward a bungalow with a long front porch. Another beep pulled his attention to the man in the vehicle behind Burgess. When he looked back at the Bungalow, all he saw was darkness.

  Picard shrugged and pulled the trunk open. Nothing to see. Just an emergency kit and an extra bottle of windshield wiper solution. He bent down and looked beneath the back seat. The vehicle was clear.

  He rounded the van and heard grass swish behind the Bungalow. He brought the radio to his lips and addressed Chief Harrington.

  “I’m looking at a Bungalow at thirty-one Linsdale. Thought I heard someone behind the house.”

  “Hold up.”

  It was quiet while Harrington checked on the position of the search crews.

  “Picard,
you’re probably hearing our guys. They’re on that end of Linsdale near the roadblock, but we’ll check it out.”

  The tension released in Picard’s shoulders. He ended the conversation and thanked Burgess for his patience.

  Then the idiot behind Burgess honked again. Picard snickered. This guy was going to get a body cavity search.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  The body of Colleen Sherman, age seventeen, was at the morgue when Bell rubbed her eyes. The clock hanging on the call center wall read three in the morning, and nothing good ever happened at three in the morning. Her father told her that. He had a point.

  The phone calls decreased to a trickle after one. Before that, the neighborhood callers reported every growling dog as the killer. She’d spent an hour beside Chief Harrington in Colleen Sherman’s neighborhood, and after Bell began to feel useless, she pawed through the backyards with the search crews, doing her damnedest to avoid Gardy’s constant texts. She was exhausted, vision blurry and legs aching.

  Harrington had suggested Bell call it a night upon returning, but she felt certain the killer would call and boast about his escape. Now Harrington was in his nice warm bed.

  The call center was a crypt. Four officers manned the phones. Two slumped in chairs, snoring loud enough to rattle the walls.

  Her eyelids fluttered and drifted shut, then popped open when footsteps approached.

  “Sorry,” she said, blinking.

  Bell sat bolt upright with her hands on the chair arms. A short officer named Boden stood over her.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Don’t you think you should sleep? You’ve had a long day.”

  She nodded, knowing he was right. Bell automatically reached into her pocket for the keys and remembered Gardy had them. She sighed.

  “I’ll drive you to the hotel.”

  Bell glanced around the room for an alternative. The tattered brown couch in the corner held little promise.

  “I can Uber.”

  “It’s no trouble. The boys already tore through an entire box of donuts, and whatever that sludge is inside the coffee maker isn’t fit for human consumption. There’s a Dunkin on the way. Besides, I saw you eyeing the sofa. You’ll want to put that idea out of your mind right now unless you want to throw out your back.”

  Bell kept the window open while Boden drove across the village. The cool night was the only thing which kept her from drifting off. Even still, her head bobbed as if she listened to eighties metal while the officer pointed out landmarks and areas of interest. Hopefully he thought she was nodding.

  The hotel doors were locked at the late hour. She rang a buzzer for entry. The door opened, and she slogged across the lobby. Apparently she made it to the elevators because the next thing Bell knew she stood before her door. The key card slid into the lock and released the mechanism before she remembered their living arrangement. The new rules. She bit her lower lip and glared at Gardy’s door across the hall, then cursed herself for mentioning Logan Wolf, when truthfully she didn’t know who she’d seen at the edge of the woods. Once again, an overactive imagination tossed her from the frying pan into the fire.

  She opened her wallet and removed Gardy’s room key. Then she edged the door open.

  He’d left the bathroom light on, but it was too dark to see into the room. The air conditioner rattled and hummed, the room uncomfortably cool as she turned off the light. Bell dragged her feet to the bed and pulled back the covers. His outline was visible on the pull-out bed, curled into a ball beneath the covers with the cold air blasting his back. He groaned and turned over when the mattress springs gave her away. When he didn’t stir again, she nestled into the pillow and yanked the sheet over her head.

  Her brain raced in the dark. She thought about the shooter and Gardy’s overprotection. So similar to her parents. Weren’t they both saying in their own ways that Bell wasn’t fit for law enforcement and needed someone to watch over her? The thought crawled inside her head like something primordial.

  Then she fell into a dream.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Bealton, Virginia, July 8, 1995

  The caw of a crow yanks her awake. Nine-year-old Scarlett turns over and watches the early morning sun move across her bedroom window.

  A part of her wishes to stay in bed where it’s safe.

  An undefinable anxiousness pulls her from bed. She puts her clothes on and quietly enters the bathroom. Her father snores through the closed bedroom door as she runs the brush through her hair. When she’s finished, she brushes her teeth and shuts the light off.

  The living room is musty with the trapped humidity of night. The dining room window is open, and the translucent curtains dance like specters with the morning breeze. In the kitchen, she pours herself a bowl of Cheerios and milk, then carries breakfast into the living room where she sits in front of the television and flips the channels. Scarlett flies past the news. Sometimes the reporters talk about what happened to Jillian, as if they knew Jillian or feel the hollow loss devouring Scarlett. Settling on cartoons, she mechanically eats her food and stares at the on-screen images. Watches but doesn’t see. Lately feelings wash off Scarlett and vanish into the netherworld.

  Scarlett’s parents are still asleep when she brings the bowl to the sink and rinses half her breakfast down the drain. The television is off now, the downstairs unbearably quiet and tomb-like.

  Before she knows what she’s doing, Scarlett shambles out the back door to the garage where she wheels out the bicycle and straps the helmet on her head.

  The bicycle is a child-size ten-speed with red-and-yellow streamers dangling off the handlebar grips. The accouterments wage war against each other, the girlish streamers in direct contrast to the pretend handlebar motor which revs when she cranks it.

  Humidity clings to her as she pedals down the driveway. It’s early, and the only person she sees is her math teacher, Mrs. Capuano, running the quiet streets. Scarlett says hello but her teacher doesn’t hear with Nirvana rocking through her headphones.

  Scarlett turns the bike down River Street. The ground mist turns the neighborhood into Lord of the Rings, and she half-expects to see Sam and Frodo gallop across the lawns.

  The creek is audible before she can see it. The trickle grows in volume as the mist thickens, the morning fog clinging to the water as the sun fights to burn it away.

  Scarlett doesn’t know why she is at the creek. It is as if fate called her.

  She lays the ten-speed on its side and removes the helmet. Her hair is already damp, part-sweat and part-mist, as she sits before the water. The ground is cool and wet against her legs, the air redolent of grass and wildflowers.

  She watches a leaf caught in the flow catch on a stick and shoot downstream. Rocks shimmer beneath the water, and the sun turns everything flaxen and gold.

  Inevitably, her thoughts turn to Jillian. Scarlett remembers their daring nighttime raid of Jeff Lombardo’s tree house. They pried the flimsy lock with a crowbar and stole his baseball card collection, then held it for ransom until Lombardo agreed to drop the Neanderthal no-girls-allowed policy. It occurs to her they never took up the boy’s offer to hang out inside the clubhouse.

  The many sleepovers and scary bedtime stories return to her, and for the first time in the weeks since Jillian’s murder, Scarlett feels. A tear crawls from her eye. She brushes it away and sniffs, and the creek becomes a blurred water painting. Colors and shapes. A concept or idea instead of a tangible piece of nature.

  Birds thoughtlessly sing to the new day as the slowly dying mist slithers around her ankles.

  That’s when she sees him.

  Nine-year-old Scarlett knows the man is the killer before his shadow emerges from the mist. She smells the death flowing from his pores as he staggers toward her like a monster out of an after-dark movie. The scream dies in her throat. He comes closer, his face almost perceptible behind the fog, as she scrambles backward on her feet and palms.

  Scarlett jolts out of her paralysis and
leaps toward the bicycle. His footsteps pound the damp earth as he tears out of the fog. The terrible squishing noises are right behind her when she lifts the bike upright and throws her leg over the seat. In one motion, her feet find the pedals while she grabs the handlebars.

  Fingers swipe through her hair and catch a blonde lock. She cries out as the hair rips out of her scalp.

  But she never stops pedaling, never looks back at the monster.

  The tires buck when the bike picks up speed. Something jars the back rim, and the man yells. His hand caught in the spokes.

  She pumps harder, hears his footsteps race behind.

  Closer.

  His breath is on her neck.

  The bike breaks out of the woods and onto River Street. Up and down the road, driveways are empty as her neighbors slumber. She cries for help. His sneakers slap the pavement. He’s almost on top of her now.

  Someone comes from the opposite direction, running and obscured by the sun. For a petrified instant, she thinks the killer somehow rounded the houses and came at her from the other end of the street. Then she sees it is her math teacher and drops the bike.

  She half-runs, half-stumbles toward the shocked Mrs. Capuano. Falls and tears her knees open on the unforgiving blacktop. Hops up and limps into the woman’s arms.

  Scarlett screams in warning. The killer will murder them both.

  But there is no one in the road behind her.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Bell came out of the dream with a yell. The room looked unfamiliar, cranking up her panic. Then she saw the light beneath the bathroom door and heard the shower.

  She scrambled for her clothes, momentarily humiliated she slept half-naked with Gardy one bed away. When did she remove her clothes?

  She gathered the pants and shirt and threw them on. The water stopped as she grabbed her shoes and socks.

  “Bell?”

  She froze.