A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1)

by Ben Miller

  “What is it?” Reilly asked.

  Jack shot him a sardonic glance as he held up the envelope, hoping the paper would speak for itself. He rounded the corner and walked into the rec room, placing the envelope on top of the bumper pool table. He swallowed hard, audibly.

  Reilly stood alongside him at the table. “That chest in the boat house was full of boating and fishing equipment: electronic depth finders, fishing rods, stuff like that. Nothing else.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Are you gonna open that?”

  Without averting his eyes from the envelope, Jack answered, “Yeah.” He walked into the kitchen, pulled a knife out of the block on the counter, and brought it back into the rec room. He picked up the envelope and slid the knife into the corner, carefully cut along the top. He set the knife down on the table and pulled apart the slit he had made, revealing a folded up piece of paper inside. He extracted it from the envelope and set the empty envelope back on the table. The unlined paper had been folded into thirds, much like any traditional letter. He unfolded it. In contrast to all of Franklin’s previous messages for them, which had been printed on a computer printer in a foreign language, this message was hand-written in plain English. Only a few words appeared on the first page, written on one line across the top:

  If you don’t get given…

  Jack looked carefully down the rest of the page, but could not find any other markings on it. He flipped to the second page:

  you learn to take…

  Again, the rest of the paper was blank. He pulled it down to the look at the third and final page, which only had an ellipse across the top:

  …

  Jack’s mind raced. He knew what this meant, but it hadn’t surfaced into his consciousness yet.

  “If you don’t get given, you learn to take…?” Reilly read aloud, his intonation indicating that he didn’t yet understand.

  Hearing it aloud actually helped Jack. Suddenly the ellipse on the last page made sense. In fact the ellipse held the crux of the message. Jack reached down and flipped the envelope over so the front faced up toward him, confirming what he already knew.

  FOR JACKSON BYRNE

  Jack quickly grabbed his phone off his hip. “Oh fuck.” He unlocked his phone and held down the “V.” “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated under his breath. He held the phone up to his ear and looked at Reilly, who stared back at him dumbfounded.

  The phone rang once on the other end. “The song,” Jack said hurriedly to Reilly.

  A second ring. No answer.

  Reilly pulled out his phone and opened the web browser. He had bookmarked the website with the lyrics to “Family Snapshot.”

  In Jack’s ear the phone rang a third time.

  Reilly waited for the website to load then began scrolling down the page.

  A fourth.

  Jack felt the urge to swallow, but he couldn’t. His mouth had gone completely dry.

  Voicemail. Jack brought his phone down and hung up. He looked at Reilly, who had never seen Jack look so helpless, so lost. “If you don’t get given you learn to take,” Jack began, reciting the song lyrics. “And I will take you.”

  “You?” Reilly asked, pointing at Jack.

  Jack looked back at Reilly. Life began to come back into his face, but it came from an evil place. Rage filled Jack’s being, so much so that he almost slurred his words as they came out. “My family.”

  “Oh, shit,” Reilly replied. He tapped his phone a couple of times to speed-dial Harringer, who picked up on the second ring. “Dylan, this is Reilly,” he said into his phone. “Get a black and white out to Jack’s house in Lake Ridge.” To Jack, he asked, “Should they be home?”

  Jack had hit the “H” on his Blackberry, speed-dialing his home. He tried to clear his thoughts for a second, to focus on Reilly’s question. He thought about Vicki’s normal schedule on a Tuesday as he looked at his wristwatch: 5:48 pm. “Should be,” Jack replied to Reilly. His phone began to ring in his ear as he got connected to his home phone.

  Jack could hear a muffled Harringer on the other end of Reilly’s phone. Then Reilly said, “We have reason to believe that Jack’s family might be the next target.”

  After the standard four rings, the home line also went to voice mail. Jack hung up that line, as he decided he would try Vicki’s cell again. Before he could dial the outgoing number, though, his phone began to ring. He had to do a double-take on the display to make sure it actually displayed the current incoming call: Vicki.

  Thank God, he thought. She’s OK.

  He hit the Send button and held the phone up to his ear, breathing a huge sigh of relief. Like a wave in the ocean, he could feel the rage that had built up fall down upon him, splashing around his feet and washing away.

  “Hey,” he said into the phone.

  “Hey,” a nonchalant voice on the other end said. A man’s voice. Not Vicki. A man.

  Jack hadn’t heard the voice in years, but he knew whose voice it was. Like a second wave coming rhythmically behind the first, the rage filled back up, but this time the wave did not break. And this wave stood much higher and stronger, and sheer terror accompanied it.

  80

  “It’s been a long time, Jack,” Randall said into Vicki’s phone.

  “Yes it has, James.” Jack tried to remain calm. Though J.R. Franklin had clearly gone insane, he still possessed great intelligence. Jack would need all of his faculties to outwit this foe.

  Randall chuckled on the other end, almost gleefully. “I go by Randall now. Have for years. Sure beats J.R.”

  Jack could detect the contempt in his voice. Has he done this to me because I used to call him J.R.? Still having difficulty finding any saliva, Jack cleared his throat in a quick burst. “OK, Randall. Where are you?”

  “At your house, with your wife and your son.”

  Jack bit his lip, holding in his anger. “What do you want?”

  Again Randall chuckled. “You know what I want, Jack. You’ve followed me this far.”

  “Well, I guess you must have us all fooled, because I’m not exactly clear on that point.”

  “Oh, you know. And you know you know. You just need to go back to the beginning, go back to where we started. It will come to you.”

  “What have you done with my family?” Jack kept trying to redirect Randall, get him back on Jack’s task.

  “Jack, Jack,” Randall said, adding a “tssk, tssk” with his tongue. “They’re fine. You need to refocus.”

  “Let me talk to Vicki,” Jack requested calmly.

  “You have to be asking yourself a question right now, Jack,” Randall responded, ignoring Jack’s appeal. “You’re asking a lot of questions, but not the right one.”

  Jack did not respond. What does he want? What does he want me to say?

  Randall continued. “You’ve followed along. You tried not to, actually, but I pulled you back in. I made you follow.” The jovial, almost playful quality fell out of his voice; it became menacing. “You’ve seen what I’ve done. You saw what I did to those little girls, Jack. You saw what I did to those two in that house. The question you should be asking yourself—the question I would be asking myself, if I were in your shoes—is…” His voice finished with a lilt, waiting for Jack to finish his thought.

  Jack did not respond right away, waiting for Randall to continue. Randall had a script in his mind, and, at this point at least, Jack thought it best to allow him to continue with his own monologue. Perhaps Randall would inadvertently reveal something he’d hoped to keep secret; perhaps Jack could pick up a clue.

  But Randall did not continue. His script called for Jack to deliver the next line. So Jack obliged, but surely not with the line Randall wanted. “Let me talk to my wife,” Jack demanded more strongly, imperatively.

  “The question you should be asking is…,” Randall repeated, agitated, his voice louder, his cadence slower, more forceful. “…If I did that to my own family… just imagine what I’m going t
o do to yours.”

  Then he hung up.

  81

  “The black-and-white is reporting no visible activity at your house,” Harringer reported to Jack over the phone. “All the lights are off and they can’t detect any motion inside.”

  “OK.” Jack sat in the passenger seat of his car as Reilly drove. Marked police cars from Woodbridge escorted them as they raced along I-95 on their way from Franklin’s vacation home back to Jack’s home in Lake Ridge.

  “More local PD and Bureau support is en route, and Amanda and I are on our way there too,” Harringer said reassuringly.

  “No one does anything until I get there,” Jack commanded.

  “Of course,” Harringer appeased.

  They hung up. Neither Jack nor Reilly said another word for the remainder of their drive to Jack’s house, which took almost another twenty minutes despite their high speed of travel.

  Jack had tried to call Vicki’s cell phone again several times after Randall had hung up on him earlier, but Randall never picked up. After the third time, Jack’s call went straight to voice mail. Randall had turned the phone off. Jack never decided what he would say if Randall did pick up. He just felt the need to continue to maintain the connection, the last remaining life line with his wife and his son. His loving, devoted wife and his sweet little boy. Jack thought back to the call he’d received from Vicki right before the raid on Franklin’s vacation home. He missed a chance to talk to her, and he hated himself for it. Or had that even been Vicki? Was that Randall, calling from her phone?

  The digital clock on the dashboard read 6:32 when they pulled onto Jack’s street. The day’s meager light had begun to fade. Reilly parked Jack’s car behind the marked police car that sat about four houses down from Jack’s. He waved a hand out the window to the Woodbridge officers who had accompanied them. They turned around in a nearby driveway and took off.

  Jack got out of the car at the same time as Harringer got out of his across the street from them. “It looks empty, Jack,” Harringer stated. “We’ve got men with infrared on all sides. No one is picking up any heat signals inside.”

  “Empty? Or nothing alive inside?” Jack asked, as he began jogging toward the house.

  Harringer followed him. “Empty,” he said in a loud voice, clearly audible to most of the neighbors on this otherwise quiet street. “Bodies don’t stop giving off heat until hours after death.” It didn’t do much good—Jack now reached a full sprint. “Jack!” Harringer shouted, trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. Harringer couldn’t keep up.

  Jack didn’t stop. Rather, he sped up. He couldn’t remember the last time he ran this fast. The toes of his shoes barely skimmed the sidewalk with each bounding step; it felt like flying low to the ground. When he got to his driveway and turned into it, he could perceive two officers hiding in bushes to his right. They rose up instinctively, as if to stop him, but, unsure, they hesitated. Jack blew by them and up the sidewalk to the front door. His hand darted into his pants pocket to get his keys, which, he recalled at that instant, sat in the ignition of his car half a block away.

  “Keys! Shit!” he scolded himself. He nearly skidded on the sidewalk as he stopped and turned around. Surely one of the local cops in the bushes would corral him this time, not let him burst into his own home and contaminate what surely had become a crime scene. Regardless, he bent his knees to start his sprint back towards his car.

  Before his first running foot hit the ground, Reilly barreled around the corner of the bushes. “Here,” Reilly called out, accompanied by the familiar jingle of a set of keys. He underhand tossed the key ring to Jack, who caught it with both hands at his waist. Jack looked up at Reilly, who pulled out his firearm as he continued past Jack. “I’m going around to the back,” Reilly shouted as he passed by.

  Without saying a word, Jack turned to his front door and withdrew his gun as well. He inserted the key into the deadbolt on the door—an act he had done less than a handful of times in the past, as he almost always came in through the garage. He threw open the door.

  “Vicki!” he screamed, echoing off the ceramic tiles on the floor. “Vicki! Jonah!” He moved quickly into the kitchen. He could hear officers filing in the front door behind him. He flicked on every light he could access easily on his way to the back door off of the kitchen. Reilly stood on their deck on the other side of the door. Jack flipped over the deadbolt before whirling around, continuing his survey of his home. Reilly came through the back door swiftly, joining the officers inside to search the home.

  Keeping a wide-based stance and his gun in front of him, Jack moved throughout every room on the first floor. No sign of Vicki or Jonah. Or Randall. Suddenly he had a vision of Sheila and Mary Beth Franklin, lying peacefully side by side on top of Mary Beth’s twin bed, her beloved dead sister’s bed left empty.

  Jonah’s room.

  Yet again Jack disregarded his training in securing a potentially hostile location when he leapt up the stairs, going straight to Jonah’s bedroom. The door stood slightly ajar. He stopped in the hallway outside, bracing himself for what awaited him inside that room. He slowly pushed back the door, reached along the adjacent wall, and flicked the light switch. In the middle of the room was Jonah’s empty bed, the comforter thrown lazily over his crumpled sheets, as usual. Jack sidled over to the corner of the room where he knelt down to check under the bed. Also empty. He grabbed the closet door and threw it back. Empty. Just like the rest of the house.

  Randall remained one step ahead of him. And now he had Vicki and Jonah, captive.

  82

  Harringer hung up his phone and walked into Jack and Vicki’s bedroom. Jack knelt beside the bed, an open lock box on the comforter in front of him. Jack’s gaze arose from the stack of papers in front of him. His eyes met Harringer’s with an intensity Harringer had never before seen, in Jack’s or anyone else’s eyes. “The clue is here somewhere,” Jack told him. “We just need to find it.”

  Harringer nodded. “We are monitoring Vicki’s phone now too. It’s also off right now, but as soon as he…” Harringer caught himself and decided to rephrase. “As soon as it is turned on, it will ping off a tower and we’ll know where she is.”

  Jack nodded and returned to sifting through files that he and Vicki had considered important enough to store in a fireproof lockbox that they kept on the floor of their walk-in closet. “We’ll know,” he said confidently. “It’s gonna be here somewhere.” Having peeled back every document in the box, he dumped them back inside and put the box on the floor. He stood up, regarding the bed. He reached down and pulled back the comforter, followed in turn by the blanket and the sheet underneath. “He’s left a clue for us everywhere he’s been. He wants to be found.” Nothing revealed itself within the bed. Jack bent at the waist and wedged his hands between the mattress and the box springs. He lifted the mattress up and shoved it away from him. It slid off the box springs onto the floor on the far side of the bed, coming to rest at Harringer’s feet. Only the white dust ruffle lay on top of the box springs. Jack lifted that up and threw it aside, but he found nothing underneath there either.

  Harringer watched this scene with pity, though he made sure not to show it. He could not imagine how he would react if some madman had taken his family away from him. Harringer recognized the impossibility of remaining impartial in this manhunt, yet still he tried to focus on the case at hand. “He didn’t leave a clue everywhere,” Harringer commented.

  Jack looked at him, an annoyed if not mildly angry snarl on his face. “Yes, he did.” He whirled and exploded into the closet, where he began rifling through the hanging clothes. Clearly he had begun deviating from rational thought, as he didn’t even know himself what he thought he’d find on the hanging rod. “Every body we found, his family…”

  Harringer cut him off. “Not with Melissa Hollows.”

  Jack stopped, each hand with a firm grasp on one of his dress shirts. He looked at Harringer. “The phone message.”


  “Yep,” Harringer agreed.

  Jack hurriedly took his phone off his belt clip and looked at the display, affirming that no voice mail had been left for him today. Strike one. He looked back up at Harringer, then launched into a sprint out of the bedroom and down the stairs, into the kitchen. Harringer followed him. He found Jack standing over their answering machine mounted on the wall above the kitchen counter. The LED display showed a zero—no unheard messages. Strike two. Jack hung his head. Harringer sighed disappointedly. Suddenly Jack picked his head up, having found some new hope. He hit a button on the top of the console on the answering machine, which played back the outgoing message.

  “Hi, you’ve reached the Byrne Family. We can’t get to the phone so please leave a message.”

  Swing and a miss, strike three.

  Jack pivoted to face Harringer and leaned against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “What am I going to do, Dylan?”

  Harringer had never seen Jack so sad, so despondent. He wanted to say something reassuring, something optimistic, but nothing came. He opened his mouth in a likely feeble attempt to provide comfort, but, before he could say anything, Heath Reilly burst into the kitchen.

  “We’ve located Vicki’s cell signal,” Reilly told them. “It came back on just a few minutes ago.”

  Jack and Harringer exchanged a glance. Harringer recognized a glimmer of hope in Jack’s eyes, which transferred to him as well. He found the optimism that had eluded him just seconds before.

  Reilly, oblivious to this non-verbal communication between the other two, continued. “And it’s on the move.”

  83

  Jack stood on the driver’s side of the unmarked car, his elbows on the roof of the car and his hands up by his face. He ran the smooth surface of his thumbnails back and forth along his bottom lip, his eyes fixed on the highway in front of him. Dusk had come and gone; night had officially fallen. The flashing strips on top of the half-dozen police cars forming the road block thirty yards in front of him provided pulsating illumination to the darkness.