Flashbyte (Byte Series - Ellie Conway Book 4)

by Cat Connor

  Sean hollered, “Ellie!”

  I turned and ran. As I ran up the cutting that led to the road I saw the rolling lights of a police car. I was almost at our car before I saw Sean on the ground with Fran. She was sprawled face-down on the gravel. Looked like she’d been running away. Sean looked at me.

  “Single shot to the back of the head,” he said.

  Two police officers clambered from the car on the road.

  “Back of the head,” I repeated glancing over my shoulder. “Shooter could still be here somewhere.”

  Pfft. A tuft of grass parted. Pfft. I dropped and rolled to the side of the cutting. Sean followed me.

  Sean yelled out to the police, “Shooter!”

  They disappeared from view. I could hear their radios. My eyes scanned the bushes, flicking back to the lifeless body on the gravel every few seconds. I watched the pattern created by bullets hitting the sand and stones. My eyes tracked back. I knew who we were after. He was too fat and out of shape to climb. Being in a tree was out of the question but I knew he was high.

  “Sean, the roof.”

  He nodded. I pushed myself backwards on my stomach, sliding into the underbrush until I found a small area to turn. Staying low to keep any silhouette to a minimum, I crept, slithered, and crawled back to the cabin. From under the low bushes I could see the cabin. I heard another gunshot and focused on the most probable area of the roof. Someone returned fire, the bullet lodged in the wooden exterior of the cabin. Another gunshot. This time I saw the muzzle flash and I knew where he was. A movement in front of me caught my eye. I trained my Glock on the leaf that moved. It moved again. This time the leaves parted revealing Sean’s face. We made eye contact. I pointed up with my left hand. He nodded and disappeared into the woods.

  Time to move. Another shot rang out. Another clear muzzle flash. The police officers were pinned down. Sean and I had to take out the shooter. I scooted to the back of the cabin and discovered a ladder.

  I figured if I took it, he’d be screwed; eventually he’d run out of ammo but meanwhile he might get another lucky shot and kill a cop. Sean appeared beside me.

  We whispered in tones so quiet we were almost reading each other’s minds. “I’ll go up,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “He thinks we’re out front, pinned down.”

  Before he could reply, I checked my magazine then eased up the ladder. Sean could either follow me, or grab my leg and pull me back. The later would be dangerous and alert the shooter.

  One rung from the top I popped up my head for a look. Fat dude at twelve o’clock, lying prone. Thoughts collided. I could shoot him outright or risk arresting him.

  Arrest. We still didn’t have Michaela.

  I pulled myself onto the roof as quietly as I could. When I stepped forward, the roof creaked. He tried to turn his head but was cast like a beached whale. Not feeling overly confident about the state of the rusty tin roof I moved with care. Sean’s weight hit the roof behind me and I felt the whole structure dip.

  “Put down the weapon,” I called. Standing, I could see the dead body, police car and our car, but not the cops. The man tried to roll and bring up his gun. “Don’t be a dick, put it down!”

  “Bitch!” he replied, still struggling to roll but was trapped by his bulk resting on his elbows.

  I was right behind him. I kicked the stock of the rifle he clutched. He lost his grip on the rifle and it slipped forward and fell to the ground below. His hand dangled after it, fat fingers wobbling.

  “You are under arrest,” I said. I reached over, grabbed his dangling arm and twisted it behind his back, forcing his face into the roof. It was harder reaching his other arm, his body had collapsed on it. Cuffing him wasn’t easy. Just being near him was vomit- inducing.

  “He’s all yours,” I said to Sean, who was watching with amusement. “How d’you want to get him down?”

  “Toss him over,” Sean replied.

  “Might kill him.”

  “He’s well padded.” Sean shrugged. “Might bounce?”

  “He might.”

  Saville squirmed causing his fat to wobble. “You can’t do that – you’re a fed. You can’t treat prisoner like that.”

  God, how I hated his oily voice.

  “Wrong. He’s not, I am.” I walked back to the ladder. “See ya down there then.”

  A sickening thud beat me down. It was followed by another thud, this time controlled and agile sounding.

  As I rounded the corner I saw Sean standing over Saville. I could hear music and it made me smile. It’d be hard not to smile at Sesame Street. The Muppets were singing ‘Cabin in the Woods.’ They were right, there was a monster and I bet he did stand by the window. But now he lay on the ground trembling.

  “Did he fall?” I asked.

  “Yeah, rolled right off. Clumsy.”

  Two cops ran toward us. For a moment all I could hear was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers singing ‘Cabin Down Below.’ Not a song I expected, but the message was clear. The thought of Saville wanting to love anyone in a cabin triggered my gag reflex.

  Two songs about cabins in succession. That meant something.

  “You okay?” one called to Sean.

  “Yeah, prisoner fell off the roof,” Sean said as they stopped in front of us in a cloud of dust.

  “Unfortunate,” the cop replied.

  “Very,” I said. “Have you called this in? We’re going to need a crime scene unit out here.”

  “We made the call when we saw you two on the roof.”

  The other cop picked up the rifle. “Where’d he get a rifle?”

  “From one of his cabins,” I replied. “What we didn’t know, folks, is that Saville has cabins out here. It’s where he brings his victims.”

  “Cabins?” the cop said. I love it when I have to explain my ability to glean information from thin air.

  “I reckon so. He may own one but I suspect he rents another one or two seasonally.”

  “That makes sense,” Sean said, unwittingly rescuing me from having to confess to weirdness via songs. He poked Saville with the toe of his boot. “Where is Kennedy?”

  Saville groaned and farted.

  Oh, man. I pulled my shirt neck over my mouth and nose. My eyes stung.

  Sean stepped back. Both cops turned away gasping.

  “You want to puke?” Sean said, glancing at me.

  “I might,” I replied, my voice muffled by my shirt. “I’ll be over there.” I moved back to where the cops were. Fresh air.

  A few minutes later Sean joined us. He was an unusual shade of green.

  “I wouldn’t put him in the car,” he said to the officers. “That weren’t no fart.”

  “Do we know where Kennedy is?” I said.

  “Follow me,” Sean replied. I followed him back to the cabin door and inside. He moved the bed aside and revealed a trap door.

  “This is the cabin he owns,” I muttered as Sean opened the trap door.

  “Mikki?” he called.

  We heard nothing. Sean descended first. Seemed fair: I took the roof, he can do the dark dingy hole under the cabin. The first thing I noticed about the dank space was the stale air, laced with fat-man body odor. I could almost make out my hand in front of my face. I knew I was still behind Sean because I felt the heat radiating from his body. There was a sharp noise, a flame flickered. Sean’s Zippo lit the area. We could see a steel-framed bed and a shape tied to it. Other than the bed there was nothing much in the room. Sean handed me the lighter and hurried to the immobile figure. I saw a sofa, on it a book. I picked up the book and flipped through it; the zippo light gave just enough of a glow to make out the faces on the pages. A year book. I put it back where I found it.

  “Mikki?” Sean said. He’d untied her wrists and ankles. She wasn’t moving.

  “Sean?” I said, moving closer with the light. “She okay?”

  He took the tape off her mouth. His fingers searched for a pulse.

&
nbsp; “She’s alive,” he said. “Only just.”

  “Let’s get her out of here.”

  He fumbled in his pocket and produced a small red case. He broke the top off a small vial, injected a clear solution from the syringe then swirled the vial to mix the components.

  “What is it?”

  Sean drew the liquid back into the syringe and expelled air bubbles. “Glucagon,” he replied pulling up Michaela’s clothing to expose her stomach. He injected the solution. “And now we wait.”

  I wasn’t holding a lighter. When I looked at my hand I was holding a pen. Sean was watching me, as were Kurt and Lee. They all looked like I’d been talking. I felt like a freak and had no idea what, if anything, I had been saying. I rolled the pen between my thumb and forefinger. God, it’s weird how my mind works. I could’ve sworn I was holding a syringe.

  “Where were you?” Sean said.

  “Under the cabin,” I replied.

  “With Mikki?”

  “Yeah, with Mikki. We got her.”

  Sean smiled. “Yes, we did. Now think – what was it that made you think of Saville’s daughter?”

  “There was a book.” My mind conjured the book again but this time I knew I was still sitting at Sean’s kitchen table. It was pretty cool to be able to flip through a book I’d seen in the past without having it physically in my hands. I turned the pages of the book, a high school year book. I recognized three people I previously did not know. Grant, Kurt, and Katrina. Katrina’s picture was circled.

  The feeling at the time was that she was going to be Saville’s next victim and we caught Saville just in time. Now I knew she wasn’t just another victim.

  I looked at Kurt. “Katrina is Leticia Saville.”

  His eyes widened. “Did Saville know she was in Lexington?”

  “I doubt he did early on, but he had the year book, so I think he figured it out.”

  “Was she a victim of child abuse at her father’s hand, or was he going to abduct her, like Mikki?”

  Well, being a victim of child abuse would explain her slutty behavior in high school. He wasn’t going to abduct her like Mikki, but he wanted something.

  “We’d have to ask her. But I think her childhood was destroyed by him. I also think the mother knew where she was, and that her adoptive parents knew the whole story.”

  Sean was catching up, or remembering everything around his sister’s disappearance. “And Mikki – she started asking questions. If she’d figured it out that Leticia was in Lexington, Saville would’ve gone to prison, just not for murder.”

  “Yeah. There she was asking questions of the man who’d been stalking her – which she was clueless about by the way. Well, not clueless. She knew she had a stalker just not that it was crazy dangerous Saville. He must’ve just about messed himself when she contacted him, after all the bombings and so forth.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth I realized how true they were. That was a smell I’d never forget.

  “Now what?” Lee asked.

  “We go talk to Katrina and slap a nice big ‘case closed’ stamp on a cold case.”

  Sean rocked back in his chair. “What I don’t get is why he stopped outside Holly’s book store for hours.”

  “He was chickenshit,” I said. “I think he stumbled upon the year book in one of the rented cabins, and saw the kid he thought was his. Remembered Holly moved out here with her folks and wanted to confirm that Katrina was Leticia. He didn’t have the balls to ask Holly, and then I came along and ruined his day.” I thought about it. Holly never knew. She had no idea her former best friend was even in the area.

  I rotated my shoulders. My right shoulder was stiffening up.

  “Shall we go prove this?” I said to Kurt.

  “I think a wee chat with Katrina is in order,” he replied, standing up. “Just out of interest, Sean, your sister was okay?”

  “Yeah, she was unconscious.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “Michaela is hypoglycemic. When we found her, her blood sugar level was so low she was almost in a coma,” Sean said.

  “Did you know that, Ellie?” Kurt asked.

  “Yeah, but not until after Sean administered Glucagon from an emergency kit he carried.”

  I looked at the ballpoint pen in my hand. Something more akin to an EpiPen needed to be developed, for hypoglycemia – would be so much easier.

  “Quite a coincidence that you almost died due to low blood sugar this morning, don’t you think?”

  The smile that settled on my lips was real. “There are no coincidences.”

  We left Sean to whatever he’d been doing before we interrupted his day with our problems and headed back to Lexington. My guess was he was going to go call both his sisters.

  Sometimes remembering the past helps us to appreciate what we have now.

  As Lee pulled the car into the hospital parking lot I spoke, “Kurt, am I insane?”

  He replied fast, “No, you’re mentally hilarious.”

  Lee chuckled. “Dang, you got that right.”

  “I suppose that’s a medical term?”

  “Of course,” Kurt replied opening the car door for me. “Come on; let’s go prove your theory.”

  They never ceased to amaze me. I have some weird brain episode, go back in time, can’t remember important stuff from yesterday – yet somehow come back with information on a cold case – and my team is right there, prepared to prove I am right. Go Delta! I must’ve done something right some time to warrant this much faith.

  I grabbed Lee’s arm stopping him in his tracks. “I may not say this often enough, but you guys rock. You are why Delta A is the best investigative team in the FBI.”

  “Chicky,” Lee crooned. “It’s good to be appreciated.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Gotta Have A Reason

  Back in Lexington recent events were no clearer in my mind but I had a damn fine handle on the past. I was sure I had the events correct surrounding Katrina/Leticia, but even so, I knew explaining how I knew would make things way too interesting and just a tad unbelievable.

  Katrina was at her desk in the ER reception. She smiled as we approached her.

  “Can you get someone to cover the desk?” I said.

  She nodded and called out to another woman. The woman took over and Katrina came out from the protective shell that was the reception.

  “What are you two doing back here?” she said. Then saw Lee and stopped in her tracks. He has that effect on women. I counted slowly in my head to three and bam! “Oh My God! Tony Sharron, from Grange?”

  Lee flinched as he replied, “No. SA Lee Davenport from the FBI.”

  Katrina paled.

  “We need to have a word,” Kurt said. “Somewhere quiet. How about Grant’s office?”

  “Sure, I suppose. He’s probably in it.”

  Kurt led the way. Katrina made attempts at small talk but I was tapped out and Lee was still sulking from the Tony Sharron comment. It’d been quite a while since anyone had mistaken him for Sharron. I noted he still didn’t find it funny. Kurt left us outside the office while he went in and spoke to Grant. A few seconds later Grant opened the door and ushered us in.

  Grant addressed Katrina, “If you would like me to stay I will.”

  She frowned. “What is this about?”

  Kurt spoke, “Have a seat, Katrina. Grant’s just leaving.” He opened the door and ushered him out. “I’ll call you back in if required.”

  Kurt and Lee perched on the edge of Grant’s desk. I sat next to Katrina on the chairs in front of the desk. Katrina’s nervousness was obvious. Time to put her out of her misery.

  “Katrina, we found evidence.”

  No, we didn’t, this is a total hunch. I pulled my fancy pen that doubled as a digital recording device from my pocket and turned it on; I placed it on the small table between us. I spoke clearly, stating the time, date and who was present in the room. Then carried on with the questions to Katrina. “We uncovered
some old information that suggests you are Leticia Saville, a missing person.”

  I had my fingers crossed.

  The color drained from her face.

  Well whaddya know? I’m right.

  “Leticia Saville,” she repeated. “Well now … I haven’t heard that name in a very long time.”

  “Could you tell us how you went from being Leticia to Katrina, from Richmond to Lexington?”

  Panic flashed in her eyes.

  “Am I in trouble? Will I go to jail?”

  “No. We’re not looking to bring charges against you. I just want to close the case,” I replied.

  Kurt gave her a glass of water and she started to talk. “I ran away from my father.”

  “From your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please state your father’s name for the record.”

  “Robert Saville. One night, while mom was out, he came into my room and tried to make me do things to him. I was twelve. He went on and on about how he was going to educate me in the ways of being a woman. How I was a whore and needed educating.”

  “Then?”

  “I hit him and screamed at him. He tried to pull off my pajama pants. I kicked him in the head. And told him I would tell mom and that she would believe me. He got mad. He held a cloth over my face. When I woke up I was in the back of the car, it was really dark. I didn’t know where I was. He wasn’t there.” She sipped the water. “I got out of the car and ran. I didn’t know where I was running to, I just didn’t want to be near him ever again.”

  “And then?”

  “I kept running, keeping off the road, in case he was coming for me. I passed houses but didn’t stop. At a gas station I used the bathroom and the phone. I’m pretty sure no one saw me. I called Mom. I told her everything. She told me to hide somewhere and she’d find me.”

  I knew the mother knew more than anyone thought.

  “Mom came. There was a woman in Lexington she went to school with. They were sorority sisters. She and her husband agreed to help. My name was changed. I had a new social security number and a new life. Mom visited a lot once the fuss died down.”