by Scott Blade
There was no police tape around it and I could see her frown. Howard was a rural cop who cut corners and she had already made one remark to him about the laissez-faire attitude. That was something that I had seen a lot in my life and I had a feeling that on my quest to find Jack Reacher, there would be many, many more such cops in my path.
She took out the key that Clark had handed her and tried it in the door. I stayed back and scanned the crowd of people behind us. They still remained a good distance away. No one came up to ask what was going on or make a statement.
I said, “We should ask around and see if anyone knows the guy.”
Vaughn said, “No. We need to hurry this up as quickly as possible. We have more important things to do. Remember? We’ve got two dead cops.”
I said, “I know. But they aren’t going anywhere. They’re dead. Maybe this guy needs our help. You know, protect and serve? Like it says on your car door. And all that. Those guys are dead. Can’t really protect them anymore.”
Vaughn shook her head and said, “I don’t have the manpower to go asking a bunch of people about a guy who tried to off himself. That’s what happened. My deputy saw the evidence already. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but Howard is a solid cop.”
I said, “I get that, but there’s one other thing that I’m curious about.”
Vaughn asked, “What’s that?”
I said, “Why the hell would you come to this small town in the middle of nowhere, rent a motel room, and then try to off yourself?”
Vaughn paused a beat and then she said, “Not sure.”
She proceeded to open the door and the lock clicked and the door swung open.
The light was still on in the motel room. It shone in a dim “motel room” sort of way, where everything wasn’t lit up bright, but all of the bulbs in the room were a yellowish hue as if the white had been blocked by months of dust covering the bulbs.
We walked in and both looked around the room. We started to the right and moved left, corner to corner. The first thing to jump out at both of us was the gun that the guy must’ve used in his attempt to blow out his own brains.
Vaughn immediately went for it. It rested on the bed next to a pool of blood that was still wet, but barely. There was more blood splattered on the back wall, above the headboard. It was more than I had expected because the guy was still alive, but it made some sense.
I remembered seeing a cop shot in the head way back in Mississippi. The guy bled a lot and at first I had thought that he was dead as well, but actually only the top of his head had been seriously grazed. I guessed that even a flesh wound bled a lot and made it look far more critical than it was.
I looked around the room. On the table by the bathroom door there was an open suitcase. The guy’s clothes were scattered everywhere. They looked clean because most of them were still half-folded, like the guy had thrown them out of the case while desperately looking for something.
I whispered, “What were you looking for?”
Probably, the gun, I had guessed.
Vaughn said, “I got the gun.”
Which I assumed she already knew that I knew, but she was saying it like she was really saying, “I got what we needed. Let’s go.”
Then I saw something peeking out from under a half-folded brown shirt. I knelt down on one knee and reached into the suitcase and picked it up. It was a Sony digital camera, black and about the size of one of my fists. It looked new, not as if it had come right out of the box, but like it hadn’t been used too much.
The screen was still on, but the low-battery light blinked across an image that I didn’t expect. I picked it up and stared at it, stood up, and kept my back to Vaughn.
From behind me she said, “Cameron. Guess what kind of gun he shot himself with?”
I stayed facing away from her and said, “A Glock 23.”
Vaughn asked, “How the hell did you guess that?”
I turned and showed her the screen on the digital camera. She froze. Stared at it.
I said, “Because it’s the same gun that he used to murder the two dead cops.”
On the screen of the camera was a picture of the two cops in the distance, alive and standing in front of the guy’s car and talking to him.
Chapter 10
I CROSSED the room to Vaughn’s side, pinched the camera by the strap, and held it out.
I said, “Better bag that gun and try not to blotch the prints. It’s a murder weapon now.”
She nodded with a look that said of course.
And I felt shameful for even mentioning it. I used to do the same thing to my mother. As I went on more and more investigations with her when I was growing up, I found myself telling her obvious things as if I was patronizing her, but that was never my intention. However, she always used to say to me, “Cameron, don’t show off. No one likes a show-off.”
Vaughn pinched the Glock by the handle part that she had already touched and held it up and out like it was a mouse. I placed the camera on the bed and scanned the rest of the room, stared at the bed, where Vaughn had found the Glock 23, and then I looked down at the floor beneath it. I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. There was nothing there.
Vaughn took the gun out of the room, pinching it out the whole way and walked to her car. She left the door to the motel room open and used one hand to open the car door and then she dumped herself down on the seat. She leaned over and across the middle console and snapped open the glove box. She reached inside and pulled out a plastic evidence bag. She sat back upright and dropped the gun into it and zipped the bag shut.
I watched her through the open door until I noticed something. Behind the door, on the floor, tucked up close underneath a dresser, I saw a pair of dark green boots. I walked over to them and kicked them over with my own boot. The left boot toppled over and I nudged it again with my boot and tilted my head and stared down at the bottom. I could see under a tremendous amount of dried dirt the number zero. Gently, I kicked the heel of the shoe and a lump of dirt crumbled off. I could see the size clearly printed on the sole. It was a pair of size 10 boots. More dried dirt was stuck up in cracks between the treads.
I turned and walked back across the room. The dull light revealed very little about the details of the walls and carpet and furniture. Everything could’ve been years or decades old. I couldn’t have been sure unless I thoroughly inspected everything with a flashlight, which I was not interested in doing.
I looked into the bathroom. There was a tub, a sink, and a small closet for towels and toiletries. Everything in the bathroom was pretty standard.
The tub was full of murky water, not quite dirty, just murky like the guy had drawn the water with a bar of soap still in the tub and the soap combined with the hot running water to make a tub full of cloudy water. Then I noticed that on the edge of the tub was a broken disposable razor. The blade had been torn out and was resting on the edge of the tub, like a wrist-cutting starter kit. The guy had thought about more than one way to kill himself.
I closed my eyes and pictured him contemplating it. He killed the cops and returned to the motel room, but nothing here was knocked over or disturbed by a man in a hurry. Therefore, he wasn’t in a hurry. He had come back to his room and decided to off himself.
I opened my eyes and walked out of the bathroom. I stopped and looked back into the motel room from a different perspective than before. Before I had scanned the room from the front doorway in. Now it was from the bathroom out, but there was nothing new to see—almost nothing.
On the floor, right against the wall above the bed, snug so tight to the lip of the carpet that I had almost missed it, was a black rectangular object like a remote control to a TV, only the room had no television set. At first I thought that it must’ve been the guy’s cell phone, but it wasn’t.
I bent down and looked at it. I didn’t pick it up. It wasn’t a remote control or a piece of the camera or the guy’s cell phone. It wasn’t any of those things. It was an empty clip f
rom the Glock 23. It had been ejected out of the gun and left on the floor and forgotten by Ryan Miles Saunt, ignored by Officer Howard, and missed by Vaughn and me.
Vaughn walked back into the room and asked, “Got anything?”
I said, “Empty magazine. From the Glock.”
She said, “Well, that plus the camera with the picture. That’s enough evidence that this was the guy who killed the cops.”
I said, “It looks that way.”
She walked over behind me and I stood back up straight. I hadn’t touched the empty magazine.
She pulled a pair of blue latex gloves out of her right pocket and slipped them onto one hand and then the next. She walked near the bed and reached into her pocket again and pulled out a new pair of latex gloves.
She handed them to me.
She said, “Better wear these.”
I put the gloves on one at a time. The latex stretched to the point of its limits as I pulled it over my hand. It was tight so I only wore the one glove. I stuffed the other one into my pocket.
I said, “Guess I only need one.”
She nodded.
I bent down and picked up the empty clip for her. She whipped out a new evidence bag from her left pocket and I slipped the clip in. She sealed the bag, making sure that each side was evenly sealed, and then she held it in one hand down by her side.
I said, “Let’s have a look at the camera. We should check out the rest of the pictures.”
Vaughn nodded and turned and walked around the bed counterclockwise. She stopped around at the other side and bent over and picked up the camera. She waited for me to circle the bed to her. I stopped and we began looking through it.
Vaughn swiped the pictures to the right, starting at the one that we had already seen.
There were pictures of the state police from a distance, at night, and still alive. The quality was low, like amateur private investigator stuff. Then there were pictures of them from a different day and in the daytime. I glanced down at the buttons on the camera. There were no words, only icons, some of which I knew and a bunch that I didn’t. I knew the little lightning bolt meant that that button was to adjust the flash on the camera. I knew that the little magnifying glass icon indicated that that was to zoom in and out of the picture or it was the zoom function on the lens or it worked for both features.
What I wasn’t sure was what the little book icon did. I’d hoped that it stood for the date and time.
I said, “Hold on.”
Vaughn stopped sifting through the photos and I reached across her and pressed the book icon button and the screen flashed quickly and a date came up.
She said, “This picture is from two weeks ago.”
I nodded and said, “Keep going. Let’s see how far back it goes.”
She began swiping again. The next picture was of a green knapsack and the next was a picture of it unzipped and filled with cash.
I grabbed her wrist gently and said, “Motive.”
Vaughn said, “I guess this wasn’t about any crooked cops other than the two dead ones. So my guys are clean.”
I said, “Not necessarily.”
She handed me the camera like she was tired of looking through it. I took it from her and continued to sift through the camera’s digital memory until I came across a picture that made my blood boil and the hair on my arms stand up.
Vaughn had stepped away and turned her body just before and was scanning the room for new evidence. I grabbed her shoulder and gently but firmly spun her around.
I said, “Not so simple.”
Her eyes looked at the camera screen. She locked in at a dead stare at the photo on the display. The glow from the backlit display was bright in the dim light of the motel room. It sprayed across her face and highlighted her features.
She said, “Oh, Jesus!”
I stayed quiet.
On the screen, there was a close-up picture of a teenage girl. She was probably sixteen or seventeen or so. Her face and torn clothing were covered in dirt and grime. Her face was shrink-wrapped in dried tears, but only on the right side because her left eye was swollen shut. It was solid black and blue. Black as the blackest night that I had ever seen. It was puffed out like a tiny, black volcano that was about to erupt at any moment. It looked so bad that I would’ve been surprised if she would ever see out of it again. The skin around the black volcano looked rotten and beyond pus covered. It resembled a dead carcass. I could only imagine the smell.
Vaughn said, “What the hell is this!”
She winced and her face turned a deep shade of blue out of anger as a reaction to the brutality and fear in the girl’s face.
I stayed quiet and flicked the screen to the next picture.
Vaughn gasped and looked away at the floor.
I stared at a picture of a different teenage girl. She was similar in age to the previous one, only she wasn’t a blonde. She was a brunette with a rounder face and a piercing above her right eye. She had makeup and dried mascara that had run down her face days before the photo was taken. This girl didn’t have black eyes like the other girl, but that was because she was dead and dead tissue doesn’t form black eyes like living tissue; living tissue is made to react to injuries and dead tissue doesn’t react to anything.
Vaughn gasped again. It was an angry, audible sound like a loud exhale of air.
I stared at the screen.
The next picture showed the girl’s whole body. She was handcuffed to a bed in what looked like a basement someplace. There were pipes and a huge dirt-covered farm sink and dim lights and disheveled, bloodstained sheets. An image is worth a thousand words, but this one wasn’t. It wasn’t worth a thousand words. It wasn’t worth five hundred words. It wasn’t worth one hundred words. It wasn’t even worth ten words.
It was only worth three and Vaughn said them.
She said, “Someone’s gonna pay.”
I nodded and said nothing because there was nothing to say. I had never been in more agreement with three words more than those three in that moment.
I looked at the picture some more and my stomach turned for the first time in my life from a dead body. I had seen dead bodies before. I had even caused some bodies to be dead myself, but none of them had ever turned my stomach like this. Not one.
The girl’s breasts had been cut off and not sliced off halfway, but completely removed as if they were scooped out by a shovel. I could see them. They were gory and lay on the concrete floor—two bloody mounds of meat and veins and fat and tissue.
Blood was everywhere.
Her chest and midsection were covered in dark dripping blood pools.
Her throat had been cut—sliced from ear to ear.
There was a gloved hand in the picture. It reached out and held her head up for the camera.
Chapter 11
VAUGHN SAID, “Oh God! What is this?”
I stepped back and looked at the wall across from us. I looked through the open doorway out at Vaughn’s police cruiser. I looked at the light bar, watched as the blue lights spun around and around. I looked down the side of the police car. I stared for a long second at the emblem on the side again. It read, “To Protect” across the top and then “To Serve” across the bottom of the Hope police ensign etched on the door.
I thought, To Protect.
Vaughn said, “Cameron?”
I said, “It looks real.”
Vaughn said, “It is. Gotta be.”
I nodded and stepped back over to her.
Vaughn said, “We’ve got to ask him.”
I said, “We can’t. He’s probably still in surgery. Not to mention he might not even wake up after at all.”
I took the camera back from her and scanned forward to the picture of the first girl. I stared at it. Nothing in the shot gave away any clues as to where she was except that it was someplace dark, probably a basement, but nothing definitive and she may not even be in the same spot any longer. There was no way to tell for sure.
Vaughn looked at it as well.
She said, “Do you think that she is still alive?”
I didn’t answer.
She said, “The other girl looks dead. As dead as anything, but what about her? If this is the only picture of her on here and she’s alive in it, then she might still be alive now.”
I said, “That’s the assumption we should work on. Until we know otherwise, this girl is alive.”
Vaughn said, “And how the hell do we find her? We don’t even know where this image is taken from.”
I said, “She’s here. Dead or alive, she’s still here. Somewhere.”
Vaughn said, “How do you know that?”
I said, “Because she’s the motive.”
Vaughn asked, “The motive?”
“What do we know about Saunt?”
She shrugged and said, “He tried to kill himself.”
I said, “What else?”
She said, “He killed the dead cops.”
I said, “How do we know that?”
She said, “Because they were killed in their car, after someone shot them with a handgun. You say it was a Glock 23.”
She pulled the evidence bag up with the Glock in it.
She said, “And here it is, no doubt.”
I said, “Plus, the empty magazine. Thirteen rounds missing and thirteen rounds fired.”
She nodded.
I said, “So Saunt shot them and then he returned here to kill himself.”
Vaughn nodded.
I said, “And why?”
She said, “Because he killed the cops and knew he’d get caught so then he came here and shot himself.”
I shook my head.
“And why not?”
I said, “Because none of this was planned out and he didn’t care if he got caught. That’s why it’s so sloppy to begin with. You saw how sloppy that murder scene is.”
Vaughn said, “So Saunt is our killer. We know that. That part’s obvious. What’re you getting at with the motive and this girl?”
I said, “How old is the girl?”
Vaughn said, “I don’t know. Fifteen? Fourteen?”
I nodded and asked, “And what about the other one?”
“Maybe thirteen or fourteen.”