by N. M. Brown
‘True that,’ the other man said amiably as he glanced round at Leighton. He did a double take when he saw his swollen eye. ‘Hey, what happened to you, Jonesy – did you get hit by a truck?’
‘Sure feels like it. Some guy attacked me outside the drive thru on—’ Leighton winced.
‘Maybe you should get yourself checked out?’ the man said, returning his attention to his screen.
As Leighton eased himself into his chair, he winced at the flash of pain that ripped across his back. He waited, frozen still, for the burning tide to finally ebb away. If the attacker had hoped that his assault on Leighton would frighten him off, he was mistaken: it’d had the opposite effect. He now knew the killer was real, and if he was real he could be stopped. The first step would be locating Danielle’s report – if it existed – and extracting any details from it.
Leighton exhaled and dragged his hands over his eyes; finding Danielle’s report could be tricky. If the report had been made this year it would have been on the new, computerised reporting and logging system, and Leighton could have searched for information by anything from incident type to zip code. However, if Rochelle’s estimation was correct, and the attempted abduction had taken place in the previous winter, the report would be filed as a paper copy. That meant he would have to wade through the mountain of files in the basement.
He got up from his desk and crossed the work area to the glass door at the far end of the room. Descending the concrete stairs that lead to the records room, Leighton tried to smooth out the creases in his shirt. He always felt a bit scruffy when he encountered the records technician, Angela, who was friendly, but meticulous in her organisation of the subterranean domain.
At the bottom of the stairs Leighton entered a large open-plan area, which was surrounded by six rows of ten filing shelves. The central space was dominated by a large wooden table, covered in piles of cardboard wallet folders. At the far end of the room, a tall woman was busily peeling sheets of paper from a large pile, placing each sheet in one of four flatbed document scanners.
‘Hey, Angela, you working night shifts now?’
The woman turned and peered at Leighton over the top of her glasses.
‘Oh, hi, Jonesy. Yeah, the switch-over to digital records is still a physical job – no rest for the wicked, eh? What happened to your face, did the captain do that?’ she asked with a knowing smile.
‘He wishes. No, it was just some random attack. I got punched coming out of a burger bar. You got a pile of paperwork there,’ Leighton said, deliberately shifting the conversation away from his injury.
‘I sure do. It grows bigger every day. Lisa and I are working our way through each month but it’s a slow process. Every record has to be scanned – front and back. Anyway, what brings you down here, got a court hearing to prepare for?’
‘No,’ Leighton shook his head, ‘thankfully. I just wanted to take a look at a report that came in last year.’
‘Sure, you got a case number?’ Angela asked.
‘No, sorry,’ he said, and offered an apologetic smile.
Angela looked at him and frowned like a teacher who’s been told by a pupil that they’ve forgotten their homework.
‘Well, have you got a plate, or vehicle identification number?’
‘No, it’s not a traffic incident.’
‘No? So, what’s your interest if it’s not traffic?’ Angela was a woman who liked things to be neat, and having a traffic officer look at a non-traffic report was not neat.
Leighton was caught momentarily off balance and was unsure of what to say. But the awkward question was avoided when a buzzer rang, signalling that somebody was upstairs at the public records window hatch.
‘You know what, I’m too busy to even care. Lisa has gone home sick, morning sickness probably, so I have to cover the desk upstairs too. Do you even know what month the report was made?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Yes,’ Leighton said, pleased to have something definite – at least he hoped it was. ‘The report came in during December.’
‘Well, I’m scanning my way through July of last year right now. If you can wait a couple of weeks you’ll be able to look it up on the system; otherwise, you’re going to have to make a manual search yourself I’m afraid.’
‘I’m fine with leafing through the paperwork – remember, I’m old school through and through.’
Angela leaned over to her desk and pressed a button on the scanner. It clicked to life and began to hum.
The buzzer rang again.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘December of last year is in that shelving unit there.’ She pointed to a tall grey structure at the end of the room. It was filled with rows of multi-coloured document wallets. ‘You already know the third row is traffic, right?’
‘Yeah.’ Leighton nodded.
‘Well, general crime is the two rows above that; serious assault, sexual crime and homicide are below, and the bottom row is missing persons. They’re arranged by date so don’t mess up my system.’
‘I won’t.’ Leighton smiled. ‘I promise. Thanks for letting me do this.’
The buzzer rang for the third time.
‘Jeez, I’m coming!’ Angela growled, and vanished out of the room.
It took Leighton over an hour to find the report he was looking for. A couple of times he’d got excited when he found the phrase ‘attempted abduction’ in the incident description box. However, in both cases it turned out to be a divorced parent trying to see their kid during the holiday season. One of them, which was familiar to the entire station, had involved a recently separated dad who had apparently met his twelve-year-old kid outside school, and taken him to McDonalds on Atlantic Avenue to hand over some Christmas gifts. The guy had told the kid’s childminder what he was doing and that he would drop the kid home afterwards. The concerned mother had made a phone call, alleging that an abduction had taken place, and the festive father found himself cuffed, face down on the floor of the burger bar, with four officers aiming locked and loaded handguns at him.
Eventually, Leighton opened a document folder to see the name Danielle underneath the incident description of assault/attempted abduction.
He sat on the floor of the records area and held the stapled white sheets of paper in his hand, peering at them. The document confirmed that the report had been made the week before Christmas. The name recorded was Miss Danielle Millar, age twenty-three, her occupation was marked as unemployed, but someone had written the word prostitute beneath this. Her address was listed as the Four Seasons RV and Caravan Park.
The report stated that the victim was propositioned at 11pm by a dark haired, Caucasian male in a red Toyota. When she rejected his advances, he’d got out of his vehicle and pursued her along the street – at which point he attempted to force her into his vehicle. The recording officer had written that it was a possible case of mistaken identity, as the victim said the alleged perpetrator had called her Veronica at various points during the altercation. Leighton took a small notebook from his chest pocket and wrote down the report number and the licence plate.
There were two things in particular that concerned him about the report. The first was that in the box titled action taken, a simple pen mark had been slashed across the page. This suggested that the incident required no further investigation. The second – and perhaps more alarming – was the fact that the officer who had made the report was Detective Slater.
Angela returned just as Leighton was struggling to slot his final three document wallets into their respective locations.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘you can leave those last ones with me – they’ll all have to come out to get scanned anyway.’
‘Thanks, Angela, I appreciate this,’ Leighton said, and he meant it.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I reckon so.’ Leighton replied, but gave nothing else away.
‘Good,’ Angela said, her hands on her hips, ‘because I am done here
too. Would you believe I’ve been here since 8am? So, the rest of the filing can wait until morning. In any case, you look like you could do with getting a rest too.’
‘I will,’ Leighton said, ‘I just have some paperwork to finish first.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He gripped the tooth in the steel pliers, held it up to the light, and peered at it. Now that it had been properly cleaned, it was a thing of beauty. He placed it in the small glass dish with the others. At first there had only been that one, small premolar, like an ivory seed. But now, thanks to his nocturnal activities, there were three of them. It was better, yet not quite enough. Not yet.
That was why the move from the small town of Lakehead to the city of Oceanside had been necessary. There were so many girls on the streets here, which meant the chance of seeing another Veronica was high. And, with so many of them lingering on dark corners, and crawling around pool halls, nobody would miss a few of them.
The urge had consumed him the previous evening. As he’d slid into the driver's seat of his car, he had told himself it was just for a drive, but he knew what he was doing. He’d cruised backwards and forwards along the Boulevard, and that was when he’d seen her: the one who got away. At first, he’d thought his mind was just blurring past and present, like it did when he saw one who resembled Veronica, but this was no trick of the mind; it was the same girl.
She was his first attempt when he had arrived in the city. She had struggled and fought in a way he hadn’t expected. Now that he was more skilled, he would know how to subdue her, but not back then. He had panicked, and some hero in an SUV showed up, forcing him to flee without his prize. The worst part was that he had left two witnesses behind.
That bitch had made him change his car. He had taken it to the Rollins Stock Cars dealership and traded it in. The salesman had wittered on about mileage but he hadn’t been listening. Instead, he had gazed around at the anonymous vehicles, and realised, if he wanted to keep killing, he should take cars from places like that. He never did take a car from that particular lot – it was just a little too close to home. However, he did dump one there.
Tonight, he planned to go for another drive, to make sure that the one who’d got away came home where she belonged.
Chapter Thirty
Sitting back in his chair, Leighton winced at the throbbing pain in his head. His hand instinctively moved to the area of injury, where his fingers found a painful, swollen bulge. He rummaged through his desk drawer until he found a small blister pack of painkillers. He popped out two white pills and washed them down with a gulp of cold coffee, shaking his head against the combined bitter tastes.
Glancing between his notepad and the screen, Leighton opened up the database and keyed in the licence plate number to check it against the DMV records. After Leighton hit the enter button, he watched as lines of information filled the screen.
The zip code in the top corner of the screen indicated that the vehicle was registered to a Californian resident. When their name appeared – Michael Stanton – it was marked in red, which indicated that he had been given a conviction, suspension or revocation. Leighton scanned to the bottom of the screen where a box provided further information, which specified that Stanton was a convicted felon. A photograph in the corner of the screen showed an awkward looking teenager, trying to appear defiant as he stared into the lens of the police camera. However, his stated age was thirty-nine. Leighton frowned and stared at the information on the screen.
The youthful face in the photograph made more sense to Leighton when he realised that Stanton had served time for unlawful killing back in 1987. Having spent nineteen years in jail, he had been released in May 2005 – less than a year and a half earlier.
If Danielle was correct, and this was the guy who’d attacked her, he had been off the streets for almost two decades after he’d originally become a killer. Leighton believed in rehabilitation, and possibly even redemption, but not for everyone. Some killers were fixed on a path that they would never step off. Stanton may be like that: perhaps he had stopped killing whilst incarcerated, and simply needed to catch up once released.
Leighton scrolled down the screen to reveal the details of his original crime. Michael Stanton was convicted of the unlawful killing of Steven Cooper and his daughter Veronica. The record indicated that both victims had died in a house fire, which had been started deliberately by Stanton.
Leighton shook his head at the idea of it and rubbed his temples.
The registered address listed was also the home address of the vehicle owner, in the town of Lakehead, San Diego.
After adjusting himself in his chair, and scribbling down some details, Leighton began tapping on the computer keyboard again. This time he brought up a selection of archived newspaper reports on the events surrounding the death of the Coopers. Leighton’s eyes widened in horror as he read exactly what had happened two decades earlier.
Chapter Thirty-One
Danielle’s feet were starting to hurt as she limped home. The previous afternoon she had picked up a pair of pink stilettos, from a sale rack in town, for ten bucks. The cheap shoes were a size too large, but this hadn’t seemed a problem when she’d initially tried them on around her apartment. However, after a night of trudging the sidewalks of Oceanside, the stiff edge of the shoes had rubbed a raw sore on both of Danielle’s heels. Eventually, she slipped the shoes off and carried them in one hand as she walked along the desolate streets, which were lined with tall palm trees.
At 3.15am the roads were mostly deserted. However, within moments a dark car appeared along the empty street behind Danielle. As it drew level with her, two young men laughed and shouted obscenities from the anonymity of a half-rolled-down window. As the car gleefully revved away from her, Danielle responded with a gesture of her own: she stuck up her middle finger.
‘Couple of real fucking heroes, aren’t you?’
Suddenly, she felt a jolt of pain in her foot. Looking down, Danielle discovered that she had stepped on to the glistening debris of a smashed beer bottle. Dropping her shoes, she tilted her left foot up to her right knee, making her look like a dislocated flamingo. Upon inspection, she found there was a small, sparkling wedge of glass protruding from the filthy ball of her foot. She gripped the sliver with her plastic nails and pulled it from her skin.
‘Fuck!’ She winced as she put her foot down on the grimy sidewalk.
It was painful, but she figured she could still walk on it. It seemed like her only option; especially as she was only fifteen minutes from home, and if she called Larry and woke him up, he would give her more than a painful foot. She was committed to making the difficult journey home.
As she glanced up ahead, Danielle saw that the dark car had stopped at the roadside, its brake lights glowing like angry red eyes; she knew that walking past the car would not be a good idea. One person would be easy enough to fight off, but two would be harder – especially with a busted foot.
Despite her painful feet, and her desire to get home, Danielle turned around and walked along the sidewalk in the opposite direction. As her bare feet slapped against the ground, she glanced over her shoulder and saw that the dark car had not moved. That was when she realised that those two young men might have been involved in Jen’s disappearance. She shuddered in fear. What if the asshole who had attempted to kidnap her had got himself a partner? She glanced over her shoulder a second time.
Thankfully, she saw a comforting sight up ahead. At the edge of the road, an old Toyota saloon was parked up, and a blonde woman appeared to be trying to change a wheel. She was crouched on one knee with a tyre iron beside her.
‘Here, I can help you,’ Danielle said as she approached the woman.
‘I know you can,’ said a deep voice, and the woman turned, revealing a masculine face beneath an unconvincing wig.
Before she could react, a Taser sent a bolt of crackling electricity through Danielle and she crumpled to the ground. She continued to shudder and twi
tch as the man in the bad wig picked her up and dropped her into the open trunk
A short while later Danielle’s body, still warm, was lifted out of the car. Once it was inside the house, the man who had taken her, knelt on Daniel’s chest and got busy with her face.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The morning sun was already warm, and the air was getting hotter by the minute, when Leighton met Danny in the car park of the station. It was 8.15am and various teams of officers, from patrol, harbour, and traffic, were leaving the building to start the day watch. Danny had left a message for Leighton, to tell him that his sister and brother-in-law were planning to spend the day at the hospital before heading back to Reno. This respite meant that Danny could complete a normal shift without sneaking around or making complicated plans.
‘So, you all set or has it been too long?’ Leighton asked him as they ambled toward the cruiser.
‘You better remind me what we got today, Jonesy. It gets a bit jumbled when you’ve been out of the loop.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s an easy one – just a DUI check over on College Boulevard.’
‘Easy maybe, but if it’s as quiet as last week it’s going to be a long day.’
‘I’d take a slow shift over a mountain of paperwork any day,’ Leighton said with a smile.
‘Well, I could try to only pull over the drivers who look sober?’ Danny offered.
After laying out a lane of orange cones, Leighton and Danny placed four yellow warning signs, thirty feet apart, along the edge of the road. The purpose of this was to guide selected vehicles out of the stream of traffic to a stopping point, where the drivers could be checked by either of the officers. They took turns to guide the selected cars to the checking area, and administer the breath test.