Coming Back

by Tabitha J Arment

  In spite of everything they were feeling, everyone met his gaze with steady determination. None of them wanted to be left out of the loop in the search to come.

  “Okay. Word is already out about what happened today. We’ve got off duty officers from other shifts and all of our volunteers from the reserve division coming in. All of the precincts have been notified and we are approved for as much overtime as required to find Veronica. The detectives are going to be going over everything we have again and all of the patrol officers in the city are going to be on the lookout for anything that could be significant. This whole city is going to be crawling with cops until we bring Veronica home. I want all of you to pull yourselves together and get out there. Do your jobs and do them well, but if you are not actively on a call, I want you working this case. Talk to all of your CIs, look everywhere you can think of, but most importantly; stay on your radios. We need to know where everyone is at all times. If you are on a call and anything feels wrong, call for backup immediately. We lost and officer today. We are not losing a second.”

  With nods and rousing shouts from all, people began pouring out of the room and back out into the parking lot.

  Blake grabbed Sam’s arm as she left the room.

  “I’m keeping you on desk duty for now.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but Blake cut her off.

  “You are a rookie. I know you want to help, but I need you to stick to your original assignment and let your training officer focus on the job.”

  Rather than go to his office, Blake left the building and walked through the lot. He nodded to Jack who was in the process of getting into his squad car and walked around to the back of the building.

  He heard the crashing before he saw anything.

  By the time he reached the source of the noise, Ben had almost exhausted himself from attaching the dumpster.

  “You okay?”

  Ben glared at him and refused to speak.

  “I received an order from my superiors before everyone got here. I’m meant to put you in protective custody and move you to a safe house until this is all over.”

  There was more banging as Ben continued to vent his aggression.

  “It would not be the first time that our killer tried to hurt Veronica through the men in her life.”

  Ben finally plopped to the ground with his knees drawn up and his back to the dumpster. “I’m not going into hiding.”

  Blake looked around to make sure that no one else could see or hear them. “I know that. Which is why I plan on telling them that you left the briefing room first, and by the time I got out, you had already left the precinct. You are going to go home and work off of all those files you’ve been compiling for the last year. Look at everything again. Find something. Call me when you do.”

  Ben fished his keys out of his pocket and left without a word.

  Blake went back to his office and pulled up Erica’s file in his computer. He had to call her family now.

  ◆◆◆

  Everyone worked the rest of the day and all through the night, trying to find anything.

  They were all sustained on energy drinks and meals bought at gas stations.

  The evening news reported on what had happened and they were soon flooded by calls from concerned citizens with “tips” for them.

  They all worked all night… and no one found anything.

  ◆◆◆

  This is better than I ever could have dreamed.

  Imagine what they would say if they knew the entire time they had been desperately searching the cemetery for their precious Veronica, she was bound and gagged in the trunk of my car.

  The entire time they were having their meeting in the briefing room, she was still in the trunk of my car.

  They all know that Hannaman was a scapegoat now, but still they have not even considered the possibility that the killer they are hunting is one of their ‘brothers in blue.’

  Idiots.

  I’ve got that bitch trussed up in my own damn garage and they are still never gonna find her.

  If any of them had two brain cells to rub together, they would have figured it out already.

  DAY 20

  V

  eronica returned to consciousness slowly.

  She tried to move and found that her wrists were bound to the arms of the chair she was sitting on and her ankles were bound to the legs.

  She struggled and felt pain radiating through her entire body.

  Having seen fellow officers take bullets in the vest before, she knew there was a bruise spreading across her chest and abdomen. It would not surprise her if she had broken ribs.

  She could feel something caked onto the side of her face and she realized it was Erica’s blood.

  It had dried onto her skin and she knew she had inhaled some of it. She did not think she would ever be able to forget the sickeningly sweet scent of it as it coated her nostrils.

  She noted with interest that she was not gagged, but understood all that meant was that her abductor was not worried that anyone would hear her if she called for help.

  She let her eyes adjust to the darkness and looked around the room.

  She saw that there was a video camera set up on a tripod in front of her, and there was another chair pushed against a metal wall. That was it.

  She could tell that she was in a freestanding garage, but there were no other hints as to her location. The sound of the outside world could not penetrate the metal walls around her, so she was left to contemplate what was coming in dark, eerie silence.

  Veronica could feel the panic attack creeping up on her.

  Between watching Erica die and the situation she was currently in, she could feel herself starting to drown in her pain and fear. She began to hyperventilate and knew that if her limbs had not been secured to the chair, she would have slid uncontrollably to the floor long ago. Her vision had narrowed down to a pinprick and she was sure that she was going to pass out.

  Then she heard something that froze the blood in her veins.

  The only sound in the room beyond her own wheezing breaths was the unmistakable sound of a key being inserted into a lock.

  She was about to meet the man that had been tormenting her this entire time.

  Mustering all of the will power she had in her, Veronica managed to slow her breathing.

  She did not want to give whoever was about to walk through the door the satisfaction of seeing her panicking.

  Although it could only have been seconds, the wait between the lock clicking and the door opening seemed excruciatingly long.

  When the door finally did open, Veronica was forced to turn away as the brightness from the light outside seared her retinas. With watering eyes, she looked back, but she could still only see the silhouette of the man approaching her.

  She watched and waited for her eyes to adjust as he moved across the space to retrieve the other chair and settled it in front of her.

  He sat and stared her right in the face, clearly enjoying her confusion.

  Veronica was paralyzed by the torrent of emotion ripping through her.

  She could not think.

  She could not move.

  She could not even breath.

  She knew this man; this man was her friend. Had anyone asked her thirty seconds before this moment, she would have told them that she trusted this man with her life. In fact, she had put her life in his hands on more than one occasion throughout her career.

  Conflicting facts and emotions swirled in her mind and she could not make them connect.

  The face before her could not be the face of a murderer. Certainly not the face of Nick’s murderer.

  When she looked into their eyes, she could see murderous intent but she could not make herself believe it.

  Part of her mind was screaming that there must be some mistake, while the other part was slowly piecing together the facts of the case and wondering how she had missed it.

  Of course the killer she
was chasing was a police officer. Of course the man tormenting her was connected to her personally. How else would he know so much about them and the investigation?

  No words were spoken between the two until the puzzle had fully taken form in her mind.

  The part of her that was rebelling against this knowledge was forced to concede that there were no other possibilities.

  She had been fooled.

  And she was going to die because of it.

  ◆◆◆

  That was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  For a moment, she had almost looked happy to see me. Like maybe I was there to save her.

  The horror on her face when she finally figured it out...gorgeous.

  I gave her every hint that she needed and she still didn’t see it until I was literally sitting right in front of her.

  If I ever needed confirmation that she had not suspected, that was it. I am going to relive this moment every day for the rest of my life.

  She’s crying now.

  How cute.

  “Veronica. Look at me. You understand now, don’t you? You never had a chance. None of them ever had a chance.”

  ◆◆◆

  Ben felt like he was going crazy.

  He had been going through all the information he had on this case ever since he got home and he had not come up with anything new.

  Not one insight or idea.

  He had not even stopped to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he saw Erica’s body on the ground or imagined what could be happening to Veronica right now. He was living his nightmare, so he did not want to know what his actual dreams would be like.

  He had been getting occasional text messages from his friends and colleagues asking if he was okay, but he would send them a terse response to shut them up and then put the phone down.

  Nothing was adding up.

  Looking closer at Eric Hannaman’s file showed that Veronica’s first suspicion was correct. He did not have the skills or intelligence to pull off all of these murders.

  But it was way too much of a coincidence that his mother’s purse with Ben’s house key was in Hannaman’s apartment. It had become clear that the purse had been planted there, but what was the point?

  Why set someone else up to take the fall when you were going to get them cleared by attacking again a couple days later?

  Was it to see how the police would react?

  Was it a test to see if they would buy it? If so, they had all failed miserably.

  Their failure had killed Erica and might kill Veronica.

  There had to be something they were overlooking that would explain all of this and help.

  He had stopped by Veronica’s apartment to pick up Ace. It seemed that he knew how serious the situation was. He had been subdued ever since Ben had brought him home. Currently, he was curled up with Charlotte sleeping on the couch. He perked up for a moment when Ben’s phone started buzzing.

  He let it go unanswered.

  He did not care who was calling.

  The phone went silent for a moment, then it started buzzing again. He thought about answering it, but decided against it. Blake would call if they had anything, and he did not care if it was anyone else.

  Once again, the phone started buzzing moments after the call went to voicemail.

  Annoyed at being bothered, Ben picked up the phone without looking to see who was calling.

  “Who are you and what do you want?”

  There was a moment of silence while the caller reacted to his tone.

  “Speak now, or I’m hanging up!”

  At this, the caller jumped in. “Ben! Don’t hang up. It’s Joe, from the lab.”

  Ben was intrigued, but not enough to get over his annoyance. “Why are you calling me, Joe? I’m busy.”

  Ben could see Joe’s exuberant nodding in his head.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just...they finished up with your computer. You know, we were checking for spyware.”

  Ben remembered Erica making the suggestion and felt his throat close up.

  “You should call Blake with the results. I’m not officially part of this anymore.”

  Joe paused. “I can’t.”

  Ben gripped his phone tighter. “Why?”

  Joe huffed on his end of the phone. “I can’t tell Blake because we didn’t find anything. There is no spyware on that computer or anyone’s phone who was there that night.”

  Ben felt like this should mean something to him, but he was so frazzled that he could not find the significance in his mind. “Why does that mean you can’t tell Blake?”

  Joe huffed again at Ben’s lack of understanding. “Think about it, Ben. There was no spyware. The house had already been swept for bugs. We swept it again to see if we had missed anything the first time, and we didn’t find anything. There is no way that your guy had eyes and ears into that poker night, unless…”

  Ben finally put it together and felt sick. “Unless he was there.”

  Ben did not hear anything else that Joe said.

  He hung up the phone and dropped his head down to the kitchen table in front of him. He let a sob escaped from his lips before he could swallow it down.

  Not only had he been hunting a fellow officer this whole time, but that officer was his friend.

  He should be relieved.

  The suspect pool had dropped from thousands of people to five. Unfortunately, those five people were his closest friends in the world.

  He did not even know where to start to investigate them. He also did not know who he could trust to help him. He figured he could bring Cheyenne in to work with him, but she just lost Erica. It would also put Ryan on alert if Ben called her away.

  Thoughts were racing around his head at a mile a minute as he considered various possibilities and quickly dismissed them.

  Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he needed help from someone on the outside. Someone who did not know his friends and had never been a part of this investigation.

  Minutes later, Ben was out the door.

  He drove to his least favorite place in the city to talk to one of his least favorite people.

  It did not take him long to get a meeting with Internal Affairs Detective Liam Hoster.

  It was not often that cops came in asking for their friends to be investigated. Ben felt queasy just standing in the building, but he knew it was his best chance.

  Hoster had investigated Ben three years ago when he had been forced to shoot someone on the job. Ben hated him, but knew that Hoster would stop at nothing to get to the bottom of this. He also knew that Hoster still felt bad about being so hard on Ben, so Hoster would be the only IA detective in the city willing to take on the case and keep Ben involved.

  It took about an hour for Ben to walk Hoster through everything that he knew. When he described the call with Joe and the implications, he watched as the color left Hoster’s face. By the time Ben stopped talking, Hoster’s face was almost the same color as his graying hair. The wrinkles around his mouth and eyes deepened to make him look even older that his 53 years.

  Hoster took a moment to digest the information that Ben had provided before he spoke. “So, you’re asking me to find out which of your friends is a killer?”

  Ben gulped and nodded. “I’m asking you to help me complete this investigation. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I know what the first step should be. We need to get our hands on the service logs from the past couple weeks and during the investigation last year. That will tell us who was working or riding alone on all of the days that women were taken. As a detective in IA, you have the authority to request that information from Blake without having to explain why you need it.”

  Hoster nodded along with his speech, clearly agreeing with Ben’s assessment. “Okay. I’ll get on that. It will take time for those files to be sent to us and even longer to go through them. I know you probably want to keep this quiet, but it would go much faster if you wou
ld let me bring some of my colleagues in on this.”

  Ben hesitated.

  Even speaking with Hoster had gone against the grain for him, letting even more IA detectives into this was not something he wanted to do.

  Hoster could tell what he was thinking. “Despite popular opinion, not all IA detectives are rats looking to jam up good cops. Some of us can be trusted.”

  Ben’s voice was tight as he responded. “Fine. But only people you are absolutely certain of.”

  Hoster stood and started moving towards his door. “Okay. You wait here. I’m gonna head over to your precinct and talk to your sergeant. I’ll light a fire under him to get those records as fast as possible.”

  Once Ben was alone in the room, he could feel his exhaustion taking taking its toll. Within five minutes, Ben was fast asleep sitting up in his chair.

  ◆◆◆

  Natasha felt like her world was crumbling around her.

  Not only was Erica dead, but Veronica was missing and possibly dead as well.

  Natasha sat at her kitchen table with a bottle of wine, lost in thought. She took another swig straight from the bottle and felt more tears slide down her cheeks.

  She had been crying uncontrollably ever since she found out what happened at the cemetery.

  She knew that everyone was out looking for Veronica, but after everything that had already happened, she was afraid they would not find her in time. For the first time in her life, Natasha wished that she had followed Veronica into the police force rather than getting a degree in art history and working at a museum. She felt completely useless as she sat in her kitchen waiting for her phone to ring.

  It sat silently in the center of her kitchen table and she willed it to indicate an incoming call. The longer she waited, the more deeply she drank.

  She had just drained it when she heard someone knocking on her front door.

  Terrified that someone felt the need to bring her news in person, Natasha felt her heart jump into her throat. Acid filled her stomach as she walked slowly to the door.