The Scarlett Bell FBI Series

by Dan Padavona

While he dripped in the tub and the fan rumbled behind the door, she ferreted through her pockets and was relieved to find the keycard.

  Gardy called to her again, but she was already at the hotel door as he stepped out of the shower.

  She quietly shut the door and turned toward her own room. The hotel hallway smelled of eggs and pancakes, and a tray of food lay beside a neighboring door.

  The door didn’t open with the key card’s first pass. She tried again, and the lock clicked open.

  Her hand was on the handle when Gardy’s door flew open. She swiveled and found him dripping in the hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist. If she weren’t furious she would have laughed. He reminded her of Ferris Bueller.

  “I didn’t hear you wake up.”

  She pushed her door open.

  “Go inside, Gardy. Someone will see.”

  “Hey, don’t take off like that. We should talk.”

  As Gardy leaned an arm against the wall, the towel unraveled, and he snatched the edges shut before she could see anything.

  “There’s nothing to talk about. Everything is fine.”

  “Is it? Because you don’t act like everything is—”

  She closed the door.

  Bell stood with her back against the door, arms crossed as she surveyed her pigsty hotel room. The overnight bag had tipped over and spilled clothes across the carpet. A once-used towel blocked the bathroom door open and lent her a peek at the scads of toiletries marring the counter.

  He knocked on the door.

  “Come on, Bell.”

  She felt like a total heel for closing the door in his face. He knocked again, and suddenly she became a teenage girl sulking in her bedroom while her father tried to lure her out of self-imposed incarceration. She blew the hair away from her face and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Bell? Talk to me.”

  She threw her shoes and socks next to her bed and plodded back to the bathroom. Though Gardy didn’t knock again and she never checked the peephole, Bell knew he was outside the door, standing there in a bath towel and shivering. She smirked and turned on the shower.

  The water was cold at first and took a long time to warm up. She danced around the spray until the temperature reached humane levels, then she let the warmth thaw the air-conditioned ice off her body.

  She reached for the body wash when the truth slammed her. The reason the shooter slipped past the roadblocks was he never drove out.

  The officers were thorough and checked every parked car nearby, confirming they belonged in the neighborhood. Harrington assumed they’d arrived too late, but Bell didn’t think so. They were quick enough to cut off the shooter.

  For a long time last night, the idea played through Bell’s mind that the shooter lived in the neighborhood and knew Colleen Sherman. It didn’t feel right, didn’t quite jibe. No, the shooter was an outsider, a stranger. He killed Sherman and abandoned the car after the roadblocks went up. It would have been easy to sneak through the backyards before the search crews swept through, and once he reached the thoroughfare he was a free man.

  But that meant his car was still there. Somewhere.

  Bell finished showering and dried. She grabbed the phone and dialed the station and got Chief Harrington on the phone.

  “Yes, we’ll be there in about an hour. Meeks didn’t get out of the neighborhood before the roadblocks went up.”

  “You think he ditched his car? We checked parked vehicles.”

  “He’s not on the street. Look for vacant houses on Linsdale, Schuyler, Hammond, and the connecting roads. Houses for sale and families on vacation. He might have found an open garage or a driveway around the back of the house.”

  She threw on a change of clothes and noted this was her last clean outfit. Either they wrapped the case up today or she’d spend the evening in the laundry room.

  Guilt panged at Bell for not sharing her theory with Gardy first. But this was her new job, wasn’t it? To hide in the call center, surrounded by cops, and unearth the killer from a safe distance.

  She was almost to the elevator when Gardy caught up.

  “Were you going to wait for me?”

  “Up and at ‘em, sunshine. Isn’t that what you always say?”

  She locked her gaze straight ahead as she walked. He wasn’t as graceful and tripped over an empty tray on the floor, and it was a strain for her not to crack a smile as he stumbled against the wall, dropped his briefcase, and kicked a plate across the hallway.

  “Will you please slow down?”

  She swiveled and faced him.

  “We only have an hour to get to the police station, and I want to eat.”

  “You haven’t spoken to me since yesterday afternoon.”

  “I’ve been busy, Gardy. You know, logging phone calls and drinking day-old coffee.”

  He set the briefcase on the floor. A piece of lettuce clung to his pants cuff.

  “You saving that for later or do you want to eat it now?”

  Gardy looked down at his pants and groaned. To her surprise, he removed the lettuce and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Yeah, I’m saving it for later.”

  She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Damn Gardy. It infuriated her it was so hard to stay angry with him.

  Bell raised her eyebrows and lolled her head toward the elevator.

  “Well? Are you ready?”

  “No, Bell. I’m not ready. Not until we talk this out.”

  She crossed her arms and studied the wallpaper.

  “Fine. Talk.”

  “I have to be honest with you. You’re acting like a twelve-year-old who didn’t get her way.”

  The scowl she gave Gardy warned him he walked on shaky ground.

  “First of all, it wasn’t my call.”

  “Weber?”

  “Right. He wanted you out of the field after I gave him the Logan Wolf letter. The sighting escalated matters further. We feel the same way about Weber, and he’s overreacting, but I happen to agree with him this time.”

  She turned toward the elevator and he blocked her.

  “Just listen for once. Wolf has your address and uncovered secrets you haven’t shared with anyone else. If it was Wolf—”

  “I’m not sure what I saw.”

  “Doesn’t it make sense to lie low for a while? At least until we figure out what he wants with you? Besides, you’re our best profiler, and nobody tracks these guys better. You want to be in the field. I get it. I want you there, too, and I’ll get you there if you’re patient. Right now I need you to find this shooter for me, and that means putting in the grunt work at the call center and interrogating the traffic cams.”

  Bell’s jaw moved back-and-forth. She nodded.

  “We might not need the traffic cams.”

  He retrieved his briefcase and grinned.

  “Because his car is somewhere in the neighborhood.”

  “Wait, you already knew?”

  “It’s a reasonable theory. We didn’t have time to go door-to-door last evening, but my belief is he hid the car. Probably found a vacant home with an open garage.”

  Bell had to chuckle. The similarity of their thinking was uncanny.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Other than the lettuce hanging out of your pocket, absolutely nothing.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Textbooks and empty compact disk cases litter the floor of the Kia. Without a credit card attached to his phone, Meeks couldn’t Uber across Milanville. Instead, he thumbed for a ride until a student on his way to Vida College picked him up. Now he peers out the window at the homes, which grow in size and luxury as they approach the college. The hockey bag lies at his feet. His clothes carry the cloying scents of weeds and day-old sweat. He’d slept in a nature preserve.

  “How close to the college do you want to go?”

  The driver’s eyes stare out from behind thick lens glasses. His appearance is boyish, a face full of pimples a
nd reddish hair that refuses to stay combed.

  The boy is nervous. Terrified.

  Meeks hasn’t spoken a word since the boy brought him aboard, ignoring attempts at small talk.

  The driver must wonder about the bag’s contents. A dead body? A bomb? What Meeks carries is equally deadly in the hands of a capable shooter. And Meeks is quite capable.

  “Mister?”

  Meeks turns his skeletal face toward the boy. He can’t recall the last time he ate.

  “Here is fine.”

  The Kia darts into the first open spot along the curb and stops. The blinker clicks like those Newton’s cradle balls that perpetually smack together.

  The boy watches the bag suspiciously, then averts his eyes when Meeks catches him staring. Meeks steps from the car and throws the hockey bag over his shoulder, and the boy drives off.

  He stands before a small hotel with sea-blue facing and white trim. A gated pool divides the hotel from the parking lot. In his wallet, Meeks has two hundred dollars. He doesn’t expect he will require money after today.

  The woman behind the counter is Mexican and speaks broken English. Two vacancies exist. Meeks chooses the top floor and pays in cash.

  A family with two young girls passes him on the balcony, but he doesn’t see them. Skittering catches his eye, and he crushes a roach under his sneaker.

  The door opens to a small, gloomy room. Blackout curtains snuff out all light. The carpet is musty, bedspread frayed and threadbare.

  He tosses the bag onto the bed and lies down, fingers interlocked behind his head, glare locked on the water-stained ceiling.

  Closes his eyes. He needs to rest. Just a little while.

  Meeks opens his eyes and doesn’t know how long he slept. Not long, judging by the glare at the window as he throws the curtains open.

  He estimates it is a little past noon as he crosses the busy avenue. The day is hot and dry, desert-like, the sky tinged gray with smog. Two white stone columns give entry to Vida College, and he reaches a brick walkway that pierces the quad and leads toward the site of the first shooting. Students pass him on either side, seeing him but not seeing him. One boy notices Meeks’ face and lowers his eyes. Meeks invokes fear. They will all fear him by sunset.

  He wanders past the library and theater, feels his legs grow weary from lack of sleep as he climbs the steps of the student center. Inside, voices ring off the walls and hurt his ears. He can barely make out where he is going, the dark standing in stark contrast to the California sun. When he exits the opposite side of the building, he stops and stares. A girl with braided hair bumps into him from behind and curses Meeks for blocking the steps.

  Blue and green banners, the school colors, fly outside the soccer stadium. A locked gate bars entry. Two ticket booths front the stadium and promote a six o’clock start time for a huge conference match. The stadium holds ten thousand, and Meeks expects a packed house.

  On the other side of the field is a wooded area. A creek runs below the small forest, and if he follows the water toward higher ground, he’ll reach the mountains.

  Ten thousand people will be cramped together when the gunfire starts. No escape. He imagines how many will die, trampled in the panic.

  This is his moment. Meeks returns to the hotel for the hockey bag.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  A pall hung over the Milanville Police Department, a dark cloud that constricted breathing and discouraged the officers from meeting each other’s eyes. Three dead in three days, the latest a teenage girl murdered steps from her home in a safe suburban neighborhood.

  Bell sat in a dimly lit room and glared at the monitor until her vision blurred. The system for examining traffic cam photos was convoluted and grossly outdated. It took longer to sift through the dates and camera locations than it did to scrutinize each picture, and after two hours staring at the screen, all the vehicles looked identical.

  The call center remained a dead end. Megan brought Bell coffee and kept her in the loop.

  Bell couldn’t believe the shooter hadn’t called back. Experience with similar lulls kept her nerves on edge—this was the quiet before the storm. The shooter would strike again today.

  She was about to switch back to a different camera when she saw the black car on Main Street. It was a large car with the right amount of trunk space, too far up the street to see on the Main Street camera. Instead, it appeared on the Fennel Avenue camera, the vehicle barely discernible at the top of the frame.

  Something about the car drew her attention. Zooming in, she saw the empty interior, but the angle missed the license plate. The time stamp verified the picture was taken three minutes before the shooting. Otherwise, there was no reason to believe this was the killer’s car, except for the way her flesh crawled when she studied the photograph.

  Officer Boden was back in the office early, working a quick-turnaround shift. Bell called him over and swiveled the monitor toward him.

  “Can you identify the car from this angle?”

  He leaned over the desk and squinted, then turned the screen a tad to avoid the window glare.

  “Looks like an MKS, but I’m not sure.” He shifted his hips as though it was possible to maneuver around the two-dimensional image. “Yeah, it’s an MKS. Probably several years old. Look at the front.”

  She did. It almost appeared the car wore a grin.

  “You’re a genius, Boden.”

  “Nah, but I know a thing or two about cars. You think that’s our guy?”

  She didn’t want to nod emphatically, but it felt right.

  “Could be. He’s in the right place at the right time.”

  A knock on the door brought her head around as Gardy peeked inside.

  “Can I borrow you for a moment?”

  Bell thanked Boden, who took her place in the chair and called up additional views of Main Street.

  “You ready to get back in the field?”

  She glanced up-and-down the hallway.

  “Seriously? Did you talk to Harrington?”

  “Yeah, and Quantico. Weber isn’t happy about it, but then again Weber is never happy.”

  Bell swallowed.

  “Wow, thank you.”

  “Ames and I are about to head back to the neighborhood and help the officers canvas the place. I’ll go door-to-door if I have to, but if we start with the vacant houses, we should be able to narrow down the search.”

  “I can do you one better. I think the shooter drives a Lincoln MKS.”

  She motioned Gardy inside and showed him the photograph of the MKS.

  “How do you know this is the car?”

  “Can’t know for certain, but it’s parked during the time of the attack, and the techs said the shot came from this direction.”

  “Lots of trunk space. Perfect for our guy.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Gardy patted her shoulder, and they hurried to meet Detective Ames in the parking lot.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  The silence cloaking Linsdale felt sinister. At this time of day, Bell expected to see children riding bicycles and playing in the yards. It was dead quiet, not a soul on the street. Even the birds hushed and shrouded themselves inside the trees.

  “Ames dug up a list of for-sale homes,” Gardy said as he drove the Outback behind the detective’s cruiser. “We’ll start on the west end and work our way down, checking for people on vacation as we go.”

  The length of the street was thick with foliage and cloaked in shadow. Secretive, Bell thought. Easy to hide in plain sight.

  They parked near the end of the road where a roadblock stood last night. From there, they walked the sidewalk while another pair of officers canvased Schuyler. As Bell studied the houses, a curtain parted, and an elderly woman poked her head through the opening. The woman pulled the curtains shut when she saw them, and her shadow traveled toward the back of the room.

  “They’re terrified,” Ames said, referring to the neighborhood.


  Until they took the shooter down, the fear would only grow.

  Ames bit her lip.

  “I’m starting to believe you were right about Hostetler. He’s not involved.”

  Bell looked at her.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The killer shot a white suburban girl six miles from campus. It doesn’t add up.”

  A for-sale sign leaned on the lawn of a sprawling ranch home. Boxwood lined the brick pathway to the front door, and a purple clematis climbed past the front window. They followed the driveway around the back and peered inside the empty garage.

  The next vacant house pulled Bell’s attention. Another real estate sign hung in the paint-chipped, white two-story‘s front yard. Next door, the lights were off, and a stack of envelopes bulged out of the mailbox.

  “You see anything unusual?”

  Gardy followed her eyes to the adjacent house.

  “Two empties in a row. That solves the problem of a nosy neighbor.”

  Ames knocked on both doors while Gardy and Bell walked the perimeter of the for-sale home. After the detective rejoined them, they followed the driveway, which angled around the house with the garage partially hidden.

  Gardy drew his weapon when the broken pane came into view. They spread to either side of the garage, Gardy on the left, Bell leading Ames to the right.

  Bell held the Glock as she peeked around the corner.

  And saw the black MKS inside.

  It was too dark to see if anyone was in the car. She gestured at Gardy, who nodded in understanding and covered her as she bent low and crept below the windows. She grabbed the handle and tugged the door open, then rolled and shifted to the corner as Gardy darted through the car’s blind spot.

  The car was empty and locked. While Ames relayed the license plate number to dispatch, Bell clicked her flashlight and moved the beam across the back of the car. Her pulse thrummed as she imagined the shooter inside the trunk, the rifle aimed at her forehead.

  She didn't see it at first. Then the light caught the circular imperfection, and she pressed her thumb against it. The circle popped into the trunk.