Ruckman Road: An Alex Penfield Novel

by Robert W. Stephens

  “Alex,” he heard.

  Penfield turned and saw Torres walking up the wooden steps of the apartment complex.

  “Try her phone one more time,” Penfield said.

  Torres removed her phone and dialed Patricia Porter’s number again. A second later, they heard her phone ring on the other side of the door. Penfield turned to Torres and nodded. She removed the master key from her pocket and unlocked the door. Penfield drew his gun and entered the apartment.

  He looked down at the black plastic on the living room floor but was surprised to see there was nobody on it. He kneeled down and ran his fingers across the plastic. It was dry and smooth. Penfield looked up and saw a woman standing by the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. He looked back to the front door and saw Torres standing just outside the apartment. She was motionless, as if she had been frozen in time. Penfield stood and walked over to the woman by the glass door.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  The woman didn’t respond. Penfield walked beside her and looked at her face. It was Patricia Porter.

  “He doesn’t want you to see him,” she said, but her voice sounded like Atwater.

  He looked at the glass door, but instead of seeing Patricia’s reflection, he saw Dominic’s. The man laughed at him. Penfield turned back to Patricia to see how she had transformed into Dominic, but now her face belonged to the mutilated and burned little girl.

  “He doesn’t want you to see him,” the girl said.

  The sliding glass door exploded into a thousand pieces. The glass tore at the flesh of Penfield’s face and neck. He reached his hand up to his face, and when he pulled it away, he saw that blood covered every inch of his hand. He looked over to the girl, but she was gone. He then looked over to the front door, but Torres was gone as well.

  Penfield didn’t remember the nightmare ending. It just seemed to fade away into another dream he couldn’t remember. His alarm on his phone eventually went off. He rolled onto his side to turn off the alarm. His body was sore and stiff from spending the night on the cramped sofa. Penfield remembered the nightmare vividly. It had felt so real to his brain that he actually touched his face twice after he woke to make sure there was no blood.

  “He doesn’t want you to see him.”

  He heard the girl’s voice in his mind as if she were in the room, sitting there right beside him on the sofa. He closed his eyes and pictured the windows of the living room shattering on their own. What had been the reason for that? Something had to make them break.

  Penfield walked into the kitchen where he’d left his laptop. He powered the computer on and opened the master folder where all of the Talbot video files were. He opened the subfolder that contained the living room files. It would be tedious, but he would have to go through them again. Perhaps there was something he’d missed on the first go around.

  He was about to open the living room folder when he noticed something new about the list of video files. He’d noticed before that each file was labeled with the date the video was recorded. Talbot had been fairly methodical about copying the files. He would start the DVR recording at night and then stop it the following night. He would back-up the files to his computer and the external Lacie drive and then start the process all over again.

  However, Penfield now saw that the last video file on the list was recorded two days before Penfield’s fortieth birthday. Talbot’s body had been spotted on the morning of his birthday. They’d suspected that he’d gone into the water earlier that night, so there was potentially a video file that was missing from the living room file folder. Penfield opened one of the other folders and saw that it was also missing the day before his birthday. He opened several other folders from different rooms in the house and found the same thing.

  There were two potential conclusions to draw. The first was that Talbot’s body had been in the water longer than they’d assumed it had been, perhaps a couple of days instead of just a few hours. The second possibility was that Talbot never got around to copying the video files from the day before he died. If the second possibility was the case, then there was the chance that they hadn’t yet reviewed all of the video. How could they be so careless?

  Penfield looked at the time on his cell phone. He was now running late for the autopsy. He took a quick shower and then got dressed as fast as he could. Unfortunately, the traffic was heavier than usual from an earlier accident, and he was close to fifteen minutes late by the time he arrived. He found Torres waiting in the building’s lobby.

  “Sorry, I’m late,” Penfield said.

  “Doc got started without us,” Torres said.

  Penfield told Torres about his thoughts on the videos as they walked to the examining room.

  “Then he must have been in the water longer,” Torres said, “because I copied all of the videos from his computer. I just dragged and dropped all of the folders, not specific files inside them.”

  “Yeah, but the point is there might still be video on the DVR from the day before we found him.”

  “No, I checked that, too. I went through those files and compared them to the videos on the desktop,” Torres said.

  “How do you know they were from that day?” Penfield asked.

  “By what he was wearing. He would appear in the living room camera first since that was the front door. I checked out what he was wearing on the latest DVR video. He was wearing the same thing as the last video on the computer.”

  They reached the medical examination room. Torres knocked once as she opened the door, and Penfield followed her inside.

  Dr. Hammond looked up at them as they walked over to his examination table. Penfield saw Hannah’s nude body on the stainless steel table. Her body was covered in blisters from her incident in the attic. Penfield thought she must have been in considerable pain.

  He’d seen many bodies in this room before. He’d thought he’d grown numb to it by now, but this visit seemed different. He felt like he’d just been run over by a truck.

  “Detectives,” Hammond said.

  “I knew she said she felt burning on her skin. I had no idea it was that bad,” Torres said.

  “Do you know what could have caused that?” Penfield asked.

  “Best guess is some kind of allergic reaction to something, based on what you told me earlier, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d told me she was recently exposed to a fire.”

  “These are burns?” Torres asked.

  “The reddening here is indicative of first degree burns. There are several places on her body, though, like her arms and back, that look like second-degree burns.”

  “What about cause of death?’ Torres asked.

  “Substantial bruising around the neck as one would expect, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’re really asking. We won’t get blood work back for a while, so I can’t tell you at this point if she was drugged. Something tells me, though, we won’t find anything.”

  “Why’s that?” Torres asked.

  “Because it was the strike on the back of the head that incapacitated her first.”

  Hammond turned Hannah’s head to the side and parted the back of her hair with his gloved hands. Penfield took a step closer to the table and saw the matted blood on her hair. He also saw bruising and a substantial lump on the back of Hannah’s head.

  “She was struck by a blunt object, which unquestionably knocked her out. She was probably unconscious when she was hanged.”

  “How do you know that?” Penfield asked.

  Hammond walked to the other end of the table and rotated one of her legs.

  “I also found bruising on the back of the legs and ankles.”

  “She was dragged,” Penfield said.

  “Most likely. Also, her neck isn’t broken. I would say the probable attacker wrapped the rope around her neck and raised her into the hanging position, or the fall from the door wasn’t of great enough height to snap the spinal column. In this case, she suffocated under her own we
ight.”

  Torres’ phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and she walked a few feet away from the table.

  “How long does something like that take?” Penfield asked.

  “Depends on a few things - like the person’s weight and the exact placement of the rope - but probably three or four minutes.”

  Hammond looked up at Penfield and saw the distressed look on his face.

  “Did you know her well?” Hammond asked.

  Torres interrupted the conversation before Penfield could answer.

  “We got a shooting at a convenience store on King Street. Two victims.”

  Penfield turned to Dr. Hammond.

  “Thanks for getting this done so quickly,” he said.

  Penfield and Torres drove to the crime scene. It was a convenience store with four gasoline pumps in the front. The building was shaped like an old 7-11 store, but the name above the door now said Lucky’s Avenue, which Penfield found both strange and ironic. There were already several police cars and two ambulances there. The officers had surrounded the parking lot with yellow crime scene tape. Torres parked on the outer edge of the lot. She and Penfield got out of the car and ducked under the tape on their way to the store.

  Neither Penfield nor Torres had commented on the autopsy results on the drive over, but Penfield couldn’t stop thinking about the doctor’s words. Someone had hit Hannah on the back of the head, dragged her down the hallway, maybe even up the stairs, and then hung her from the bedroom door. The person must have known the autopsy would uncover the head wound, so why stage it to look like a suicide? On the other hand, most criminals weren’t that smart, and they may have thought they could easily trick the police. Still, this person or persons had managed to evade him and Torres for several days, so they weren’t fools. Maybe they’d just hit Hannah harder than they intended to in the potential struggle. At that point, there would be nothing they could do but follow through with the staged suicide and hope the head wound wasn’t as bad as it might be.

  Penfield and Torres entered the shop, and they were led to one of the victims by the responding police officer. They found the first body behind the counter. The man had two gunshots to the chest. There was an enormous amount of blood on his clothes and the surrounding floor. Penfield saw what looked like a 9mm pistol a few feet from the body. Blood had pooled around the weapon as it flowed from the dead man. The victim was probably a cashier who grabbed for his gun when the holdup started. Not a smart move in Penfield’s opinion, but one he and Torres saw all the time. It almost always proved to be a fatal mistake for the cashier unless the criminal was nervous and fired off a wild shot. Of course, there was always the possibility the criminal’s gun wasn’t loaded, or it was a convincing fake.

  “Where’s the other?” Torres asked the officer.

  “Back aisle,” he said.

  They walked to the back of the store near the coffee makers and saw a woman on her side. Blood was around her head and had turned a portion of her blonde hair a pale red.

  “He kills the cashier, and then she screams. So he kills her, too, in case she saw his face,” Torres guessed.

  “Probably something like that,” Penfield said.

  Penfield turned to the officer, who had followed them to the back of the store.

  “I assume this place has security cameras,” he said.

  Penfield looked to the ceiling and immediately saw a camera pointed at them.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t appear to be working. We checked the system in the back. Not only was it turned off, but all of the video cables were unattached.”

  “Great,” Penfield said.

  “Any witnesses?” Torres asked.

  “Lady across the street who owns the nail salon. She said she saw a car speed out of the parking lot,” the officer said.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and her shop has a camera that captured that car leaving,” Penfield said.

  “Don’t count on it,” Torres said.

  They spent the next hour interviewing witnesses. None of them had anything useful to add. Torres had been right when she said the salon shop probably didn’t have a functioning security camera. It didn’t even have a system to begin with. The salon owner couldn’t be sure of the make and model of the car. She even got confused on the color of the car. At first, it was a pale blue, but it had turned into a green car by the end of her statement to Penfield.

  They worked late into the night trying to chase down leads on the suspect but came up empty-handed. They were striking out on both cases, and it was only a matter of time before they got stuck with another case and then one after that. Soon, the death of the Talbots would go cold, if it hadn’t already.

  A few weeks went by before they got their first lead on the convenience store killing. Penfield had a friend who owned a few local pawn shops. Cops and pawn brokers weren’t exactly on the best of terms, but Penfield had gone to college with the guy, and they had an understanding.

  Home robberies would often involve the criminal pawning the stolen items, such as jewelry, to a pawn shop within thirty or forty miles of the burglary. Penfield wouldn’t bother his buddy unless there was a murder involved. They each owed the other, so to speak, and they were good enough friends to not keep tally. Furthermore, there was that time that Penfield had introduced his friend to the young brunette woman with the long legs. That brunette had become his friend’s wife.

  It turned out the convenience store perp had taken the time to lift a diamond tennis bracelet from the lady killed in the back of the store. That bracelet showed up a few weeks later at his buddy’s pawn shop. Unlike the other stores involved in the crime, this pawn shop did have a functioning camera system, and it got a crystal-clear shot of the man selling the bracelet. Penfield and Torres circulated a still image from the video. Chances were the guy had committed a crime before, and someone in the office might remember him. The guy had, indeed, been arrested for armed robbery. He’d just gotten released after serving seven years. Penfield compared the release date to the date of the murders at the convenience store. Exactly three days had passed since he’d been out.

  They got an address from the parole officer. They determined it was the perp’s mother’s address by checking her DMV record. She was predictability less than willing to help Penfield and Torres locate her oldest son. The detectives got lucky again, though. The guy came home while they were there. They spotted him driving by the house as they entered their car, which was parked on the street. Torres would not have seen him if he hadn’t made a brief moment of eye contact with her as he drove by his mother’s house.

  He sped up a few seconds later, and the chase was on. It lasted several blocks before a nearby police car assisted. He attempted to block the road, but the perp slammed his car into the front quarter panel of the police car. He made it another half of a block before his car quit on him. He got out of his car and attempted to flee on foot but quickly stopped after Penfield leveled his weapon at him.

  Torres approached the man and struck him in the side of his face with the butt of her service weapon. He stumbled backward and would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t braced himself against his car. Torres took another step closer. His head was turned away from her from the previous blow, and she hit him a second time on the back of his head. This time, the man fell to the ground.

  Penfield gave a quick look around the area. These days there was always someone nearby with a video camera that captured everything for the world to see. He didn’t immediately notice anyone pointing a cell phone camera at them, though. Penfield walked up to the unconscious man and placed him in handcuffs. He looked up at Torres who was putting her weapon back in its holster.

  “What the hell was that?” Penfield whispered.

  “He made an aggressive move.”

  Penfield looked at the man again. There was already swelling on his cheek bone and blood on the back of his head.

  They didn’t celebrate the closing of a doubl
e homicide. Penfield had no desire after witnessing Torres’ out-of-character brutal behavior, and they’d already been saddled with two more cases since the convenience store crime.

  Penfield couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a full night’s sleep. His side hadn’t gotten any better lately, and he was starting to doubt he’d ever be the same.

  Penfield got home that night, had a can of black bean soup for dinner, and collapsed on the sofa afterward, as was his usual routine. He turned the television on but almost immediately muted the sound. His mind immediately drifted to Hannah. He hadn’t been able to get the image of her dead body on the autopsy table out of his head.

  There had been no new developments on her probable murder, as well as the probable death of Joseph Talbot. Penfield had now become convinced that Talbot had indeed drowned the day the jogger spotted him. He still couldn’t explain the handprint on the master bedroom window pane, nor could he understand the presence of the young girl.

  Atwater had described her as an energy that had been created through the horrible trauma of the house fire. Penfield still wasn’t sure what he believed. He’d seen her with his own eyes. He’d even been touched by her, but there was the video. It hadn’t captured her presence. Penfield didn’t know how his own vision could have been so different from the camera’s reality. They had captured her voice on audio, though. Torres’ phone had proved that. So was the girl real? He just didn’t know.

  He and Torres hadn’t discussed the Talbot case in several days. Maybe they were both resolving themselves to putting it behind them. Penfield closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep, but he opened them after a few seconds. His brain was too wired, and he knew sleep would be difficult tonight.

  He was about to head back to the bedroom when he heard the doorbell ring. Penfield looked at the time on his cell phone. It was just after nine o’clock. He walked to the front door and spotted Torres through the peephole. He opened the door. Torres’ eyes appeared to be a little glazed over. He thought she might have driven drunk to his house.