A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1)

by Ben Miller

  With that Jack pulled a two-way radio off his hip, depressed the button on the side, and said “OK, now” into the plastic grill in the front. He put the device back in its place. Within seconds a marked Woodbridge Police car slowly meandered down the lane and then swung into the gravel driveway beside Franklin’s vacation home. Two uniformed police officers got out of the car and walked shoulder-to-shoulder up to the front door. Jack and Reilly saw one officer knock on the front door, and they could even hear the sound faintly from this distance. After several seconds, the door hadn’t opened. The knocking officer looked at his partner, then knocked again.

  “Dr. Franklin?” he said. “Mrs. Franklin?” Jack and Reilly could clearly hear the officer, but they could not hear any response. Given the lack of movement or recognition from the officers on the front stoop, Jack guessed that they hadn’t received one. He could see a lamp lit in the front right room of the house casting a glow on the closed curtains, but he could not perceive any motion around it or from within the home.

  The officer reached up and knocked once more and repeated his call for the Franklins, a little louder this time. He and his partner waited another thirty seconds, and then walked off the stoop back to their car, exactly as instructed if they received no response. They got back into the car, reversed out of the driveway, and drove slowly down the road from where they came, towards Jack and Reilly.

  Jack reached down for the radio on his hip again. Before he got his hand around it, he felt a vibration on the other side of his belt. His cell phone. He quickly reached over and pressed the top button to silence the phone and he removed it from its clip in one fluid motion. He looked at the display: Vicki. He let out a sigh. He had expected Harringer with some breaking news on the case. But it was just his wife. He put the phone back on its clip and pulled the two-way radio off his hip.

  “OK. Plan B. Now,” he said calmly into the radio, which instantaneously sparked a well-choreographed chain of events. All eight SWAT officers moved nimbly into place, three at the front door and two at the back. One remained on each side of the building. The eighth member had positioned himself at the back corner of the house where the electric meter and phone lines entered the home. He had already removed bolt cutters from his gear and, with Jack’s most recent signal, he cut the power and phone service to the home. The lamp in the front room went dim, and the officers in the front and back simultaneously broke through the entryway doors.

  “Police!” they each shouted several times, clearly audible to Jack. He and Reilly had drawn their firearms and waited several beats. Once all three officers had entered the front of the home without incident, Jack said, “Go!” They broke into a full sprint heading straight for the front door. Even though they covered the ground between the van and the house in less than fifteen seconds, they couldn’t immediately see any SWAT members when they got to the front door. But they could still hear them, shouting “Police” each time they entered a room or opened a closet door. Jack moved to his left, into a rec room with a bumper pool table in the middle. Reilly moved to the right, into the TV room. A SWAT officer remained on each half of the first floor and at the base of the stairs as the other three (the bolt-cutting man had joined his compatriots inside the house) ascended the stairs to the second floor.

  A few more incantations of “Police” echoed down the stairwell before a new, more intense shout came raining from the second floor. “POLICE! FREEZE! DON’T MOVE!”

  Then silence. No response.

  Jack still breathed heavily from his sprint less than a minute ago. He tried to control his breathing so he could focus on the sounds from above, but he could not stop his heart from thumping, drumming in his own ears. He heard a creak in a floor board above his head, startling him. He looked up at the cream-colored ceiling above him. A bead of sweat that had settled in his eyebrow dropped into his eye, causing him to blink repeatedly until his hand could wipe it away. Another creak, this time a couple of feet closer to the far wall. He walked along under the sounds, tracking them from one floor below. Then the creaks stopped; the person above him stood still. More silence. Jack looked at the SWAT officer standing a few feet away him in the rec room, but the officer did not return the glance. He kept his focus—and the aim of his assault rifle—on the ceiling above them.

  Then the voice, the same one who had demanded a freeze, came down from above, this time talking more than shouting. “We’re gonna need a bus. We got two bodies up here.”

  Jack’s breathing involuntarily stopped, his heart sank, his eyes fluttered, his head dipped down. They had failed. They had failed to stop Franklin before he killed again.

  77

  Jack stood motionless in the threshold of the small bedroom, gazing upon the scene within. The light pink walls had a darker pink wallpaper border that ran along the top, assimilating crown molding, adorned with a pattern of white and red hearts. Twin beds with matching white quilts sat in the two far corners of the room, a shelf of knickknacks on the wall above each one. The bed on the right seemed untouched, completely empty. Two lifeless bodies, a woman’s and a young girl’s, lay nestled next to each other face up on the other bed. Their arms at their sides and their eyes closed, they looked as though they could be sleeping soundly, save their pale, bloodless complexion and their lack of chest wall motion. Even without the suntans and the smiles, Jack recognized them from the photo on the wall in the doctor’s office earlier: J.R. Franklin’s wife Sheila and his younger daughter Mary Beth. He had murdered the remaining members of his own family.

  The SWAT team had cleared the rest of the house, including the small crawl space above the second floor: No sign of J.R Franklin. They awaited the arrival of the local coroner and crime scene investigation team; Reilly had called Quantico to inform Harringer of their findings and to request an FBI team on the scene as well. A quick survey revealed a pristine home without sign of forced entry or even the slightest struggle. It would seem that Sheila and Mary Beth Franklin had died peacefully.

  Jack crept forward into the girls’ bedroom to get a closer look at the bodies. He crouched down next to the bed, careful not to touch the quilt or even the floor below as he had yet to don any gloves. He looked at the expressionless faces of the two victims. He wondered if they fully realized at the moment of their death what a terrible monster their husband and father had turned into. Or perhaps they knew full well. Perhaps he had always been a monster, but he waited until the last two months to unleash it on the rest of the world. Jack did not want to try to imagine the horror these two people suffered.

  He leaned in closer to examine the skin on Mary Beth’s face, her hair, the quilt behind her head. His eyes worked over her outfit—a collared knit shirt with a plaid skirt, strongly resembling an elementary school uniform—for any blemishes, any tears or stains. He studied the skin on her exposed arms and legs. He could not find any obvious outward signs of trauma. To him the cause of death remained a mystery at this point.

  “Sick fuck,” Reilly said from the doorway, staring down at the corpses with his hands on his hips.

  Jack looked sideways at Reilly as he stood up. He nodded in response. “You don’t know the half of it.” His voice felt foreign, quiet, as if he had consciously to push the words through his vocal cords and out of his mouth.

  Reilly’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  Jack looked at him and sensed that he had upset him. “No offense. It’s just… you don’t have a family. Yet, I mean.” Jack looked back down at the dead woman and her little girl. “How anyone could do this… to their own family… It’s unspeakable. Unimaginable.”

  Reilly nodded in agreement. “Super sick fuck.”

  Jack let a smile crack on his lips, in spite of himself. “Super sick fuck,” he repeated.

  Jack’s phone vibrated on his hip. He pulled it off to look at it, suddenly remembering that he would need to call Vicki back soon. “Harringer,” he announced to Reilly. He pressed the Send button and put the phone up to his ea
r. “Jack Byrne.”

  “Get Reilly and put me on speaker,” Harringer instructed from the other end of the phone line. Jack and Reilly went downstairs and each grabbed a pair of disposable gloves out of a box on a lamp stand by the front door. They walked into the rec room, where Jack placed the phone face-up on top of the bumper pool table.

  “OK, we’re both here,” Jack said towards his Blackberry.

  “You have anything there? Any clue as to where Franklin might go?” Harringer asked.

  “Not yet,” Reilly answered. “But we’re really just getting started.”

  “Move fast,” Harringer commanded. “You both know as well as I do that an event like this usually signals the beginning of the end. We need to find Franklin before he continues this killing spree.”

  “Definitely,” Jack concurred. “Anything with cell signals?”

  “No. Franklin’s phone has been off since we started to trace it. Same with the wife’s. Both had what would seem like normal activity yesterday. Neither of them made or accepted any calls today. Any guess on COD?”

  Reilly looked at Jack, who answered. “No obvious signs of trauma. I’m gonna guess poisoning or intoxication of some kind. He’s a doctor—he could have access to all kinds of stuff.”

  “Right.” Harringer seemed resigned. “We’ll keep you posted; you do the same.”

  “Yep,” Jack said, while Reilly responded with a “Roger.”

  Jack picked his phone up off the table and went to put it back on his belt clip when he remembered that Vicki had called. He looked at his display to find that she had not left a voice mail, nor had she texted him. He decided that she must not have needed anything dire, so he could wait a little later to call her back. He wrote her a text instead:

  Big break in case today with crazy developments. Will call soon.

  78

  The coroner arrived just before 4:15. Jack met him in the front entryway of the house. A short, stout, balding man with an overgrown, unkempt beard, Dr. Grayson Battle had served as the Prince William County Coroner for almost two decades. Jack found him surprisingly spry and cheerful given the horrific situation.

  “Hey, Jack Byrne, pleasure to meet you!” he said as he vigorously shook Jack’s hand. “Let’s get a look at this crime scene!”

  Jack pointed up the stairs. “First room on the left…” He couldn’t finish his sentence, as Dr. Battle bounded up the stairs two-at-a-time, an impressive feat given his size and stature. Jack followed him up at a slightly slower, steady pace. He saw Dr. Battle march into the middle of the bedroom, where he set down a kit that resembled a large tackle box. Dr. Battle flipped open the top and strapped on two large latex gloves. He then spun around to look at the corpses on the bed. He pulled a handheld digital audio recorder from his front pants pocket, depressed record, and began speaking, spewing out the time, date, and location.

  Jack went back downstairs and returned to his task of going through items in table drawers, chests, cupboards, etc. Franklin had led them all down this path so far with his variety of clues; Jack felt certain that another such message awaited them somewhere in this house to send them to their next stop on this wild goose chase. He leafed through a stack of magazines in a basket in the corner of the TV room, finding nothing. Where would he leave a message? Jack wondered to himself. He thought of the link between the song and the previous messages. He suddenly wished that he were back at Franklin’s house in Lake Ridge, closely perusing the album collection they had found in the apartment above the garage.

  “They got the door off of the little boat house.”

  Jack looked up from the magazines to see Reilly, who had come into the house through the back door and taken a few steps towards the TV room. Without saying anything, Jack got up to follow Reilly, who turned and jogged back outside.

  A small structure— more of a boat shack than a boat house— stood at the edge of the back yard. A small wooden dock extended from beside it to about fifteen yards into the bay. If the Franklins owned a boat to dock there, it had spent the winter in storage and hadn’t made it out yet. The shack had both a padlock and a deadbolt on the only door. They had cut the padlock off a while ago, but they couldn’t get the deadbolt easily. No one found any keys in a quick survey of the house. The SWAT officers had decided to remove the door from its hinges, as this might take less time than getting a lock expert to pick the deadbolt. The door had been pulled back to reveal a meager shed. Life vests hung on a short two-by-four nailed perpendicularly into the frame of the shed on one side. Small spikes nailed into the frame at about shoulder height supported two unused oars. In the corner sat a set of bocce balls, horseshoes, and some Frisbees. On the right a large fiberglass chest took up nearly a third of the floor space in the small enclosure. It too had a padlock on the front of it.

  For reasons he didn’t fully understand, Jack felt a chill run down his spine when his eyes fell upon that chest. As he regarded the large size of it, his first thought was that it could easily fit a dead body. Or even a few dead bodies, if they were small enough. He knelt down and examined the floor around the chest. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find, but he couldn’t see anything abnormal, such as any drainage from inside the chest or damage to the floor below.

  Jack stood back up and looked around him, noticing that everyone’s eyes had fixed upon the chest. He sensed that they shared his apprehension about what lay inside it. He looked at the officer who still held the bolt cutters from before, the one who had severed the power supply and the padlock on the shed door. “Could you cut that, please?” He pointed to the padlock on the front of the chest.

  The Bolt Cutting Man nodded and stepped forward. He opened up his trusted device and placed the blades on either side of the semicircular arch running through the loop on the chest. He took a deep breath, flexed his arms, and snapped them together, letting out a short but clearly audible grunt. The padlock cracked and fell loudly to the floor, followed by a lighter clang of the now displaced piece of the loop. Bolt Cutting Man then stepped back and out of the shed. He had completed his job; he wanted nothing to do with actually opening the chest.

  Jack looked at him out of the corner of his eye with a hint of disdain. He stepped forward into the shed. Daylight, which hadn’t surfaced to any impressive degree all day, had begun to fade, making it a little difficult to see clearly inside the shack. Jack didn’t have the patience to wait for someone to retrieve a free-standing light, though. He reached down and grabbed the now free metal plank that had been locked under the metal loop in front of the chest and threw it back on top of the lid. He placed each hand on a corner of the chest, having to crouch slightly to expand his arms out that far. He paused for a brief but palpable second before lifting up on the lid to open the chest.

  “Special Agent Byrne!” The shout came from behind them all, from someone running out of the house. Startled, Jack let the lid slip, crashing back down at he turned around. The officer came running straight to him, stopping less than a yard in front of Jack’s face. “We need you inside. We’ve found something.”

  79

  Following the young officer, Jack jogged into the vacation home through the back door. The officer led him to the base of the stairs. He grabbed the top of the post at the bottom of the railing and used it to center himself as he pivoted the corner.

  “Whoa!” The officer stopped at the base of the steps and backed away. Two uniformed officers descended the stairs with one of the bodies on a gurney. By the size of the form encased in the black bag, Jack guessed it contained Sheila Franklin’s remains. When the officers got to the bottom of the stairs, the wheels of the gurney flopped down and began rolling along the ground as the officers pushed it out the front door. The young officer leading Jack leaned forward to peer up the stairs. “The coast is clear,” he announced as he began ascending the stairs. Jack following closely behind, two steps at-a-time.

  They turned and entered the girls’ bedroom, where Dr. Battle crouched in the center of
the room near his tackle box, peeling his latex gloves from his fingers. The officer walked to the back of the room as Jack approached Dr. Battle.

  “Obviously I still need to do the autopsies, but I have a prelim on COD. I found small needle marks in the antecubital fossae of each of their right arms.” He pointed to the inside of his right elbow with his left hand, indicating where he had found the injection sites on the bodies. “I think some toxic agent was injected there, likely after the victims had been sedated, as there were absolutely no other signs of trauma. They did not object to getting a needle in their arms.”

  Dr. Battle shifted his weight on his haunches, turning back towards the bed. “And, after we removed the bodies, we found that.” Jack followed Dr. Battle’s gaze to the bed. On it laid a standard size white envelope. Even from this distance, Jack could read the hand-writing on the envelope:

  FOR JACKSON BYRNE

  Jack’s gaze darted back to Dr. Battle, who broke his trance from the envelope to look back at Jack. “I didn’t move it. It’s been there since we removed the bodies.”

  Jack had found his message from Franklin. He walked over to the bed and leaned over to closely examine the envelope. It sat idly, unsuspectingly on the quilt, with a few wrinkles around its edges from the weight of the bodies that had sat upon it. Jack reached out with a gloved hand and picked up the envelope. He half-expected some alarm to sound, some booby trap to go off, but nothing happened. He stood up and held the envelope in front of his face, between his eyes and the portable halogen that the coroner’s team had brought it. Light passed easily through the edges, but not so much through the rest.

  “It’s just paper,” Jack surmised aloud. He held the envelope with both hands by the top corners as he walked out of the room and down the stairs. Reilly had just come in from outside and met him there.