A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1)

by Ben Miller

  “Ooh, a gourmet. Well, you can still have some of my nachos. I probably won’t eat them all.” She looked over both shoulders and leaned into the table, speaking in a somewhat lower tone. She was a ball of energy. “So, number three, huh?”

  Reilly nodded slowly, almost sadly. “Number three.”

  “So it’s definitely linked to our killer?” she asked.

  Reilly began to nod. Then he recognized an opening. “You mean the Playground Predator?”

  “Yeah?” she replied, obviously not understanding why his tone had changed.

  He studied her for a moment, trying to discern the veracity of her response. “Apparently a reporter used that term during a broadcast tonight.”

  Corinne looked shocked. “What?! Who?!”

  Reilly’s eyebrows rose up his forehead; he had not expected this response.

  “That name was my idea!” she said. “That motherfucker stole it from me!”

  “How do you suppose they did that? Have you used it with anyone?”

  “No one, I swear,” she promised. Reilly intuitively believed her. “I was waiting for the go-ahead from you to use it. Fuck!”

  Reilly hadn’t expected such profanity, especially during their first real meeting in person. He liked her fieriness. He wondered if she had that much passion with everything she did. “You’re taking this pretty hard?”

  “Hell yeah!” She took a deep breath and exhaled through her bottom lip, blowing those hanging strands of hair away from her forehead. “Sorry, I’m not mad at you, Heath.”

  She used my first name, he thought, trying hard to keep his best poker face and not reveal that he had noticed.

  “I just…I don’t know,” Corinne tried to explain. “It’s…”

  Heath guessed that she rarely found herself at a loss for words. However, her struggle ended abruptly, as she rapidly shook her head with a few small oscillations and smiled.

  “Whatever. It’s not important.” She took a fierce swig of her beer, swallowed it down, and took a deep breath. “So, what are you thinking now?”

  Reilly recounted the details about the time leading up to Danielle Coulter’s disappearance, her discovery, and the likely exit route. He explained their next few steps, about continuing to search for any witnesses that may have seen the un-sub. He had to be careful not to divulge too much, so he kept it simple. He did share his idea about the likelihood of the killer’s preceding reconnaissance missions to each site.

  “That makes sense,” Corinne concurred. “Clearly he’s not a local at any of these places, right? And he had to pick out his locations carefully, know the ins and outs. You can’t explain his lack of being sighted at any of these scenes as simple luck.”

  “Exactly.” Reilly took another sip of his beer. He was nearly two-thirds through his first bottle. He looked across the table as Corinne tipped hers back to polish off her first.

  “So what does your day look like tomorrow?” she asked.

  “My day?”

  “Yeah. What’s next for you in your part of this investigation? I assume you’re hanging around here?”

  “Yep. Camilla and I—“

  “Vanderbilt?” she interrupted.

  “Yeah. She came up with me today.”

  “You two work together a lot?” She took the first tug from her second beer.

  “I guess. She’s a good partner. Not that we are really assigned partners, per se. But we tend to get sent on assignments together often.” As he said this, Reilly couldn’t help wondering why she seemed so interested in how much he worked with Camilla. Was she jealous? he hoped. He swallowed down some more of his beer.

  “Sorry, you were saying what you’re doing tomorrow when I interrupted you.”

  “Oh, yeah. We need to go talk to the little girl’s family tomorrow. We’re all under the assumption that this is a random killing, just like the other two, but we can’t leave any stone unturned. Perhaps these are all related in some way that we just can see yet.”

  She narrowed her eyes and studied him. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “No,” he answered quickly. “But we have to consider it.”

  She nodded. “You don’t seem real enthused about doing that interview.”

  Reilly paused to finish his beer. He regarded her question, trying to decide how much to share. “It’s obvious, huh?”

  She nodded with an understanding curl to her lips.

  “I hate it. It’s the part of this job that I hate the most. By far. These people are going through the worst experience imaginable. Actually, it’s so bad it’s unimaginable. No one should be able to imagine what that is like. More often than not, they’re so fucked up that they can’t even think straight. And here I come along to ask them questions—sometimes very personal questions—to try to find the person who attacked their child. I try to stay compassionate, you know, but sometimes they stagger and stammer and can’t give a straight answer because their heads are so jumbled. It becomes frustrating. But I can’t get frustrated, because these people are going through such a fucking awful time.” He waved his hands in front of him. “Sorry. TMI, huh?”

  “No. I asked the question,” she reassured him.

  A muscular forearm with wristbands suddenly held a plate of nachos in between them. “Nachos?” the food-runner asked.

  Corinne looked up at him. “That’s us.”

  “Careful, plate’s hot,” the surely future body-builder said as he set the plate down in the middle of the table. He put a small plate in front of each of them and a short stack of napkins on the edge of the table. “You need anything else?” he asked, his tone clearly indicating that he didn’t care.

  “Nope, we’re good,” Corinne replied. Corinne began to pull tortilla chips off the pile and pop them into her mouth, disregarding the appetizer plate in front of her. “Help yourself,” she reminded Reilly.

  “Thanks, I’m good.”

  “Ok,” she said, continuing to eat the smothered chips. “So,” she began with her mouth still half-full. She took a swig of her beer to help her wash down the nachos. “It seems that talking with victims’ families would constitute a decent proportion of your job. Am I right?”

  Reilly nodded. “Ah, yeah, I suppose.”

  “If you hate that so much, do you hate your job?”

  “No. Not at all. I kind of love my job.”

  “So all the other aspects are just that much better?” Before Reilly could answer, she fired another question his way. “I mean, why… why are you in this job? Why the FBI? Why CASMIRC specifically?”

  Reilly took a deep breath and held it, not saying anything. He slowly let it out. He grabbed a cheese-laden chip from his end of the plate and popped it in his mouth. As he chewed he raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly. He grabbed his beer and swallowed some, trying to nullify the sting of the jalapeno pepper that found its way onto his bite. He took another swallow.

  Finally, he looked Corinne square in the eye, fully intending to answer her question honestly. She stared back at him with her striking green eyes, having taken a break from inhaling nachos. Reilly broke his gaze from their locked eyes and reached for another chip.

  “You know, we’ve been talking a lot about me here. How about you tell me what your thoughts are on this case?”

  His refusal to answer her question was obvious to both of them. Corinne decided to let it go—for now—and answered his question.

  48

  Jack lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The warmth of the day had lasted into the evening, so Jack and Vicki turned on their ceiling fan on its lowest setting prior to going to bed. The glow from their bedside alarm clock cast looping shadows across the ceiling; Jack’s eyes continuously followed the shadow of one blade as it went from short and stubby on the near side to a long, slender one on the far side.

  His thoughts bounced back and forth between the two momentous pieces of news from that day. A third child murdered, and The Playground Predator surely the culprit. H
e hated the name, he thought to himself. Having a media moniker seemed to play right into his hands, to build his fantasy. He had spent too much of his time in the past wondering how much the mass media, in all its iterations, altered the course of police investigations in this society. He decided long ago to lament this no more, accept it as part of the job, and move past it. Hell, as a published author on the topic of a sensationalized crime, he now could lump himself into the media heap. He didn’t like thinking about that very much at all.

  He wondered if this third victim came with another message, embedded in a foreign language. Surely it had; the killer would have no reason to stray from his MO at this point. What did it say? What did it all mean? And, of course, the biggest question of them all, why kill innocent little girls? And why now?

  And why—Dear God, why—would Melissa Hollows take her own life? She had been through some horrible things, worst of which losing a child. Her marriage had crumbled. She had slept with a married man. But she had always seemed so strong, so self-assured. Suicide did not make any sense to Jack.

  But he knew that it must; he must somehow make sense of it. She had called him yesterday for a reason. He replayed her voicemail again in his head. It certainly had romantic undertones, but it didn’t sound romantic at all, not in the way that she had said it—sobbing, nearly hysterical. Her delivery took a possibly endearing message and made it almost scary.

  Did she want him to feel guilty? Was this about him? He already felt tremendous guilt, every day. But for Vicki, not for Melissa.

  But what if he had answered his phone yesterday instead of letting it go to voicemail? Could he have prevented this? The thought hadn’t crossed his mind before now, and it terrified him. Perhaps Melissa was reaching out for help, and, for some reason, he served as her last lifeline. Had he answered his phone, would she still be alive? He quickly shoved this idea out of his head; his mind couldn’t bear to contemplate that much responsibility right now. Not for this.

  He tried to refocus his thoughts on his current project: his political platform. He had a great base, as he had spent almost an entire chapter in his book discussing child protection laws. Since his book, they had become a hot topic in social circles and around Capitol Hill. He knew the current laws’ shortcomings inside and out. Now he needed to find a solution, a proposal to propel his campaign. A vague outline could suffice for now, but eventually he needed to conjure up something concrete, something that would work. He had no intentions of someday getting elected to public office only to fall short of his campaign promises. He saw this as the bane of our current political system.

  Suddenly his thoughts shifted back to Melissa’s voicemail. With the ferocity and abruptness of a thunderclap, a thought rose to his consciousness: her message seemed familiar. He pored through his interactions with her— despite how ashamed some of those now made him feel— trying to remember the details of their conversations. After several minutes he felt almost certain that she had never uttered those words to him before. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had somehow heard that phrase from her voicemail sometime before.

  As he pondered this topic, he found that he could no longer follow the shadow of a single ceiling fan blade in its oblong path. His eyes felt heavy, so he decided to let them close.

  49

  The morning after Jack had sex with Melissa Hollows for the second and final time he got out of bed shortly after 5:00 am. He hadn’t slept much at all, thoughts of Lamaya Hollows’ killer’s DNA spiraling through his head. He quietly rolled off his side of the mattress, showered, and dressed, all without waking Vicki. As he silently opened the bedroom door to leave, however, she stirred.

  “Where are you off to?” She squinted at the digital clock on his nightstand. “It’s so early.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Jack said, apologizing for so much more than she knew. “I got a hunch last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  She nodded, her eyes still mostly closed, then rolled away from him. “Good luck, hon. Have a good day.” She nearly slurred the last two words; she fell back asleep before he got to the kitchen.

  Instead of going to his office at CASMIRC in Quantico, Jack drove straight to the police station in Potomac, Maryland. He arrived around 7:00 am. He parked in the mostly empty municipal lot adjacent to the station. He decided it was too early to call the Twin Towers McElhenny and Minert, so he chose to kill some time by walking half a block to the nearest Starbucks for his morning coffee. When he got back to the station, he sat for a minute on the front steps, checking his e-mail on his Blackberry and finding nothing of importance. He put the phone back on his belt.

  He felt anxious, excited. He dug his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, rubbing deeply, before pinching the bridge of his nose. He surveyed the well-manicured lawn in the front of the police station. The sun glinted off a dew drop, waiting to fall from the leaf of a rhododendron a few feet away.

  His current state of anticipation conjured up one of his earliest memories: Christmas Eve, four or five years old. He had gone to bed as instructed around 9 o’clock and somehow managed to fall asleep, despite his excitement about the following morning. Some time later—now he couldn’t remember, but he thought that he hadn’t yet learned how to tell time—he awoke. His room remained pitch dark except for the glow of a street lamp emanating through the slit under his blinds. It was still nighttime, still too early to get up to open his presents. Santa may not have even had a chance to come to his house yet.

  But what if he had come, and all of his presents—and Jody’s presents too, of course—happened to just be sitting down there, waiting for him to play with them, ride them, toss them around? This thought bounced around his head, much like the oversized Superball he had gotten the Christmas before.

  He sat up in bed and remained there, legs dangling over the side, listening intently. He could not hear any other noise in the house. Surely Mom and Dad had gone to bed by then. Surely everyone else lay fast asleep. After a few minutes, he could no longer resist the allure of the bounty that potentially already surrounded their Christmas tree. He slid out of bed, tip-toed to his bedroom door, twisted the knob slowly, and opened it inward. He knew of the characteristic creak that echoed down the upstairs hallway when his door reached the half-open point, so he stopped just short of it. He turned sideways and sidled out of his room into the hallway.

  Jody’s door remained closed. Mom and Dad’s door was closed too, and he couldn’t see any light coming through underneath. They must be asleep. He continued down the hall, still on the tips of his toes, to the top of the stairs. A soft light bathed the staircase and spilled over to the end of the hall. He and Jody had insisted on keeping the living room table lamp lit to help Santa find his way around. Jack turned the corner at the end of the hall to look straight down the staircase. He climbed down the top two steps before pausing.

  Did he really want to keep going? What if Santa had already come, and his presents really did sit down there? Could he still act surprised in the morning, when he and Jody ran down the stairs together to discover their haul?

  He sat down on the steps to ponder his next move. His bravery had faltered, and now he contemplated retreating back to his room.

  Just then he heard something: a clank. A single, solitary clank. It came from the living room. He racked his brain, trying to figure out what could have caused that sound. When he almost gave up, having convinced himself that he hadn’t actually heard anything, another sound shot at him, again from the living room.

  He froze. Someone was downstairs.

  This second sound was different, higher pitched. This sound he recognized: a drinking glass being set down on a hard surface. An empty drinking glass. With this revelation he now understood the previous sound. He concluded that the first sound was that of an empty ceramic plate, coming to rest also on a hard surface. Such as their brick hearth. The brick hearth in the living room where he and Jody had left a plate of cookies and a glass of milk for Santa Claus.<
br />
  Santa Claus was in their house!

  He didn’t know what to do. He knew that Santa never came until after both he and his sister had fallen asleep. What would Santa do if he found out that one of them woke back up? He had heard from Aaron Turk, one of the other kids in preschool, that, if Santa ever sees a child awake, snooping around the house, he would take back all of the presents—even those for his sister—and he would probably skip over their house the following year. He wanted so badly to meet Santa. Jack would act very politely, of course, opening with a huge “thank you” for all of the presents, this and every year. Would his friendly greeting be enough to prevent Santa’s disappointment, and the potential punishment that might ensue?

  After several pensive seconds— always a thoughtful boy, that Jackson Byrne— he decided that he wouldn’t take the risk. He quietly rose to his feet, walked back to his room, and crawled into bed. Amazingly, he willed himself to fall back asleep almost immediately.

  Now Jack—who had turned into a thoughtful man— sat on these steps, feeling much like that little boy some thirty-five years ago: so eager to proceed, yet wary of the possible implications of his actions. He brimmed with both exhilaration and trepidation. He suddenly felt that so much rode on the next several hours, on the presence or absence of DNA in that piece of chewing gum recovered from Lamaya Hollows’ stomach.

  He twisted his wrist to read his watch. 7:46. It would have to do.

  He stood up and walked inside. A young uniformed male officer sat behind thick glass at the front reception area. The officer, whose nametag read DENARDO, politely informed Special Agent Byrne that neither Detective McElhenney nor Detective Minert had reported in yet that morning. Luckily, Jack had their cell numbers in his phone. He chose to call McElhenney, the one with the deep bass voice. He walked back outside as he retrieved his cell phone.

  McElhenney answered before the second ring. “McElhenney.”

  “Hi, Mac, it’s Jack Byrne.”

  “Jack, how are you? And what are you doing standing outside our police station?”