“Tori and I don’t think he killed Jessie Hunter or Genevieve Lash. The longer you take the better.”
“Then the question is, and this isn’t my department, mind you…but if it isn’t Brule, who the hell is it?”
“We’re working on it, Doc.”
Cal wanted everyone to reconvene tomorrow, after a night off. “We all have a lot to think about,” he stated while casting an aggravated look in Tori and Braddock’s direction. “I think we need to get to the point where everyone is singing from the same hymnal.”
As they dispersed from the garage Tori mumbled, “What are we going to do?”
“Go back to my place and strategize while we still have some time before we have to sing the Ave Marie in five-part harmony.”
Braddock stopped at Mannion’s On the Lake and picked up a pizza to go and met Tori back at his house. They repaired to his office with the pizza, a six-pack of beer and stared at the map up on the wall. Will related his call with Renfrow. “He’s sitting on it, but he can only do that for so long.”
“He called you. He has doubts. That helps,” Tori said with a hopeful tone.
Braddock was more sanguine. “He has some doubts, sure, but the far more compelling case is that Brule pulled that trigger and killed himself. Renfrow might not ultimately like it, but he’ll swallow it and sign off that Brule did himself in and the reality is, that would withstand any sort of scrutiny.”
“And,” Tori replied, “Cal, Backstrom and Wilson are ready to call it. For all intents and purposes, they have.”
“When they do, we’re dead in the water,” Will stated. “I mean, the sheriff is my boss.”
“But,” Tori protested.
“They’re convinced that Brule did all this and if they decide to go all in on it? It gets harder and harder for me to keep this open and keep investigating. You heard Cal’s none too subtle warning about getting on the team. My hands will be tied.”
“Yours might be. Mine aren’t.”
“You have a boss too, that will be calling you back home soon enough. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Cal to pay your boss a friendly call and see if he has a crying need for you to return. And if that happens, then what? Are you going to defy them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s face it. We might have to do what Backstrom says. Take the win. I don’t like it, but right now I don’t see a way around it. Especially since we don’t have an answer to the question of if not Brule, then whom?”
Tori stood up and paced around the room, quiet in thought before giving the map on the wall one last long look. She knew he was right, at least for tonight. Tori looked back to Braddock, who was sitting in his desk chair, looking at her with eyes that said he was done working.
She slowly began walking toward him. With her eyes locked on his, she deliberately unbuttoned and then unzipped her slacks and let them fall to the floor. With both of her hands she slowly lifted her sleeveless blouse over her head to reveal her toned body, leaving her in a white lace bra and underwear.
Braddock quietly admired her body for a moment before he sat back in his chair, welcoming her to him. Tori climbed on and straddled him in the chair, reaching her arms around his neck and drawing him in for a soft, lingering kiss.
“You’re right, I might have to leave soon,” she whispered before pecking him softly on the lips, resting her forehead against his.
“You may,” Braddock answered in a murmur, lightly running his fingers up and down the soft skin of her back. “But you’re here now.”
She looked into his eyes. “I am and after the last two nights, how good it’s felt, I know this much. If I do have to leave soon, I want to do as much of this as possible before I do.”
CHAPTER 26
“NOBODY WILL BE SURPRISED THAT I WENT ROGUE.”
T ori stepped out of the shower to find a fresh soft towel, a toothbrush and a fresh red rose waiting for her.
It stopped her in her tracks.
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had made such a romantic gesture. Of course, you needed to provide someone a reason to want to be adoring and, on that score, Tori most of the time failed. Often willingly.
It wasn’t that there were never men in her life. Attracting men was never really an issue for her. She had attractive features, kept herself in fantastic shape, was professionally successful and despite her occasional prickly demeanor, was approachable and welcoming of the attention of men.
What she wasn’t was emotionally available. That part of her was closed off. The men she let into her life from time to time served a singular purpose. They tended to the occasional need for sex and companionship, perhaps a needed date for a wedding or formal party, but that was it. Before she ever let it get any further, before there was ever a conversation about where something might be going, she found a way to nuke it. Usually, the convenient excuse was another case to go chase. She’d leave on a plane, cut off contact, immerse herself in the investigation and then when the case was over, she’d return home and the man had moved on by then, a result that rarely, if ever, bothered her.
Because of those life choices, there were rarely romantic gestures like flowers. Yet there was one this morning and as she dressed, she found herself constantly glancing at the rose, twisting it in her fingers and putting it to her nose. As she was wont to do, she analyzed her infatuation with the flower. Was it the gesture itself or who made it that had her feeling some lightness?
Careful, Tori, she silently admonished herself.
“Breakfast will be ready in five minutes,” Braddock bellowed from the kitchen.
“Okay.”
She finished by putting her hair up in a damp ponytail. She picked up her rose and glanced at her watch. 6:32 a.m. As she strolled out of the bedroom, down the hall and past the office she saw that the beer bottles, used paper plates and napkins along with the pizza box from last night remained on the desk. “I should clean that up.”
Tori went into the office, glanced to the ever-present map on the wall with all the victims and their locations before she sat down at the desk and started depositing the empty beer bottles into the small office garbage can, along with the used paper plates and balled-up napkins. Next, she looked to the Mannion’s pizza box. She flipped the top over and saw there were three slices left inside before securing it again. On the cover of the pizza box was Mannion’s, written in red cursive and a map of all the Mannion’s restaurants throughout the Upper Midwest and Mountain states. As she stood up and picked up the box, she looked at the cover again, the map of locations and froze.
“Wait a… minute.”
Tori looked from the map on the pizza box to the map on the wall, with all the dots of the missing women, then back to the pizza box. Then she looked back to the wall and then back to the box again.
“No way.”
She took the box over to the map on the wall, her eyes darting back and forth. “Holy shit!” Tori ran out of the office out to the landing. “Will! Will!”
“Yeah, what is it?” Braddock asked, coming into the family room, a set of tongs in his hand. He looked up to her. “What?” he asked, catching the alarmed look on her face. “What is it?”
“You have to come up here and see this,” she exclaimed, holding up the top of the pizza box.
“See what?”
“Just come up. Just come up right now.”
Braddock quickly climbed the steps three at a time to meet an ashen Tori on the landing. She reached for his hand and pulled him into the office.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just look at this,” Tori commanded, holding the cover of the pizza box up next to the map.
She watched as Braddock’s eyes first slowly and then with more rapidity moved back and forth, first the slow recognition followed by the stunned disbelief.
“What? Whoa!” Braddock blurted as he grabbed the pizza box from Tori and held it up in front of the map, his eyes still darting back and forth between the tw
o maps. Finally, he looked at her. “Is this really possible?”
“You tell me.”
Braddock stepped over to his desk, sat down and powered up his computer and clicked his way to the Mannion Restaurant website.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Tori stated. “Go get the breakfast and bring it up. I’ll do the research.”
For fifteen minutes they devoured pancakes and sausages while they put black Xs on the map to mark the Mannion’s locations. They were, in all cases, remarkably close if not directly on top of the green and red dots for the victims.
“It’s frickin’ uncanny,” Braddock mused with a muted laugh, slowly shaking his head. All twenty-three disappearances were within fifteen miles of a Mannion’s.
“What we need to do is get more data points to either prove or disprove it,” Tori analyzed, her arms folded. “If we go in right now and tell the sheriff and county attorney about this, they’ll…”
“Have us committed. They’re practically ready to do that to us now.” Braddock finished, still looking back and forth between the two maps, still questioning what he was seeing. “We created that database. Gunther was in it. I wonder how many Mannion’s employees are in it,” he mused as he sat down at the desk and remoted in to his office computer and the database. With several keystrokes he refined his search. “Man, a lot of people work for a Mannion-related company in this area.”
“It’s a company town now. How many?”
“That fit the age and residency criteria? Seven hundred twenty-six.” Braddock shook his head in despair.
“Would it have to be a Mannion’s employee?” Tori asked.
“Don’t you think so with this kind of correlation?”
“I bet you that number gets significantly smaller if we limit it to the restaurant operation of the business,” Tori noted. “That would be a data point to help sift.”
“We could…try and see if we could drill that down, but…Hmm, I wonder.” Braddock turned back to his laptop and the web page for Mannion’s On the Lake. He clicked on locations, which listed all the Mannion’s restaurants.
The first Mannion’s expansion was to Bismarck, North Dakota. He clicked on the restaurant, which pulled up its vital information: address, phone, hours of operation and then there was a history link. He clicked on it and it had a picture of the restaurant on its opening day along with the date. He called to Tori, “What date did Carrie Blaine go missing from Bismarck?”
Tori looked to the map on the wall. “May 24, 2004.”
“Mannion’s opened there on May 23, 2004,” Will replied, turning his computer around. “That’s a picture of the opening. All the local dignitaries along with Kyle and Eddie Mannion holding the big scissors to cut the ribbon.”
Will went back to the locations page and clicked on the link for Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “Oshkosh opened September 15, 2009.”
“Ginger Zeller went missing…September 14, 2009,” Tori replied. “Leanne Benson, Cedar Falls, Iowa, she disappeared November 1, 2011.”
Braddock clicked back to the locations page and then clicked on Cedar Falls. “Opened November 3, 2011. Joannie Wells disappeared from Brookings on July 15, 2019.” He clicked back to the locations page for Brookings, South Dakota. “Mannion’s opened in Brookings… two days earlier on July 13, 2019.” He exhaled a long, anxious breath. “Oh, boy.”
“We better start from the beginning,” Tori murmured quietly.
For the next half-hour they worked through each restaurant opening in order. In each instance their victim disappeared within at most three days before or four days after the opening of a Mannion’s restaurant. While Will confirmed all the opening and disappearance dates, Tori got online with her laptop, using her FBI access to every publication available, finding five newspaper articles tied to the early expansion openings of the restaurants with pictures of Eddie and Kyle at the ceremonies.
“Is this really happening?” Tori asked in shock before locking eyes with Braddock. “Will, if this is Mannion Companies, how many people from the company are always going to be at the openings?”
“I know where you’re going.”
“Yeah, I mean over nearly twenty years, it’s going to have to be one of the two guys in the pictures.”
Braddock closed his eyes and shook his head, “Man, I’ve really enjoyed living here. I go down this route and I can kiss my ass goodbye.”
“That’s why…this one’s on me,” Tori answered.
He started to protest. “Hold on a second.”
“No. If need be, I made this connection all on my own, me and my friends at the FBI, because I was so frustrated dealing with Backstrom, Wilson, and even Cal, who just wanted to bury the case with a dead man,” Tori replied with a wink. “Nobody will be surprised that I went rogue. Nobody.”
“Well,” Braddock snorted a wry chuckle, “that’s true.”
“I’ll take this part of it from here,” Tori added while placing a call. Special Agent Tracy Sheets answered right away. “Trace, I need your help. Are you available like…today, maybe?”
Braddock watched as Tori listened and then mouthed a “yes” with a fist pump and then held up one finger and mouthed an hour.
“You rock, girlfriend, you know that?” Tori exclaimed, smiling. “And I’m going to owe you massively and I will pay. Have you seen Hamilton yet? Well, you and your husband are going to. Now, when you get free we can discuss this more. In the meantime, I’m going to send you an electronic file that will be helpful.”
A minute later Tori was off the phone. “She can talk in an hour. She obviously has more access and resources available to her to dive into this. But in the meantime, we need to throttle back Cal and Backstrom. We need to buy some time.”
“I’m on that,” Braddock replied, reaching for his cell phone and placing a call to the Dr. Renfrow for another conversation. “Doc, how do we stretch this out a little more? Even just a day.”
“I’m waiting on some additional bloodwork, but it’s really not that consequential. But you know, until either Cal or Backstrom starts pressing me I feel no real need to be in a big hurry,” Dr. Renfrow answered. “Although Will, it’s only a matter of time before I do get the call.”
“Understood, Doc. I’ll be in touch.”
With Renfrow still slow-walking his report, the sheriff and county attorney couldn’t call the case closed.
“I think you and I should both make ourselves scarce today,” Braddock suggested.
“That’s easy for me, I plan on burying myself at the hotel on my computer,” Tori answered. “But what are you going to do? You can’t hide.”
“But I can take a road trip,” Will replied with a wink.
The road trip was back up to Brule’s cabin outside of Walker. The crime scene tape was still up. Braddock checked in with a deputy standing post at the end of the driveway and then drove up to the cabin.
If Dr. Renfrow had his doubts, Brule’s cabin demanded another look. This time as a murder scene. Once inside the front door, Braddock set his backpack down and deliberately walked around the family room and kitchen area, once again familiarizing himself with the scene and visualizing Brule slumped in the chair, the gun beneath his right hand. He stood in the middle of the family room, Brule’s chair to his left, the coffee table in front of him and another chair to the right with an old rust, beige and green plaid couch on the other side of the coffee table. He wondered, If Brule didn’t shoot himself, how did it happen?
He went to his backpack, reached inside and took out a manila folder and walked back to the middle of the room. In the folder were pictures of the crime scene. One by one he sifted through the photos, many of which were of Brule slumped dead in the chair, but also of the space around the seating area. He spread the photos on the floor in front of him and crouched down to view them all. He organized them left to right based on what the photo captured, whether it was Brule and the chair, or the coffee table in front of Brule showing a coaster and glass, and the
n two photos where the photographer had stepped back to get more of a panoramic photo of the room.
He paced gradually left to right, looking down at the photos, often pausing to look between the photo and the chair or the coffee table. At the second to last photo he stopped and picked it up. It was one of the panoramic photos. There were two coasters out on the coffee table, one in front of where Brule was sitting which the photos show had Brule’s drink glass on it when he was found, and one resting on the other end of the table, in front of the chair at the opposite end.
“If someone was here, perhaps they were sitting in the other chair,” Braddock mumbled as he walked around the chair in question. He looked to another photo, which was of the .75-liter bottle of Maker’s Mark, which was found nearly empty. The bottle was purchased on Saturday night, not long after they’d paid him a visit at the VFW. He bought it with a credit card at five minutes to ten, just before closing time for the liquor store. The expenditure was for $25.99 which included the bottle of Maker’s Mark and a bottle of Diet Coke, based on the liquor store receipt Eggleston chased down.
They’d confronted him at the VFW around eight p.m. and that lasted perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes. He took out his cell phone and called Steak.
“Cal’s looking for you.”
“You haven’t seen or heard from me, got it?”
“Uh, okay.”
“I need you to access Brule’s phone records for the Saturday night Tori and I went to confront him until we found him dead. I want to see if he made any phone calls. But Steak, be discreet and keep your head down.”
“I presume this relates to why Cal’s looking for you and you’re unavoidably detained?”
“You should be a detective.”
Braddock took another look at the photo of the bottle of Maker’s Mark, which was photographed sitting on the counter in the kitchen. He strode into the kitchen and shook his head in wonder. He often thought that for a single parent with an active eleven-year-old boy he kept a respectably clean house but Brule, the ex-soldier, took it to another level. That part of his training and discipline had not left him. The photo showed the bottle of liquor on the kitchen counter. There was nothing else on that stretch of counter that ran along the south wall of the house from the sliding door to the kitchen sink in the corner. In the sink, oddly or maybe not oddly, was a single glass. He started to reach with his gloved hand and then stopped.
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