A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1)

by Ben Miller

  “So that’s… that’s what this is all about?” Jack tried to hide his incredulity. In this moment his brain could not conceive how someone could take lives just to get famous.

  “Yes,” Randall affirmed matter-of-factly. “This has been my way. My way out of my rut. My rotten, rotting, miserable life. My Work.”

  “Why not, I don’t know, write a book? Cure cancer? Do something, anything else? Why this?” Jack raised both palms to his sides—his magnum still in his right—illustrating the horrific scene surrounding them.

  “I know it seems cruel, but sometimes we have to be cruel to for the greater good. One step backward and two steps forward, you know? Sometimes cruelty is what people need, but they may not know it. Do you know how to break an infant out of SVT?”

  Jack’s brow furrowed in confusion. Before he could try to respond, Randall continued.

  “Of course you don’t. Why would you? When I was a resident in pediatrics covering the cardiology floor, we used to do it all the time. Babies who have certain abnormal heart rhythms, like SVT, need interventions to put them back into sinus rhythm. Now, we could give them medications that often work, but they have side effects, and it can take several minutes to draw them up and infuse them. So, instead, you know what we do? We put a bag of ice on their face. We hold it on there, shoving it into their face, until they break out of it. It induces fright, causes them to gasp, to Valsalva, sending a nerve signal to their heart to jump back into a regular rhythm. Talk about cruel, Jack! But it’s for their own good, you see?”

  Jack slowly nodded. Of course he didn’t see. The rationale, the comparison, was completely insane. This verified for Jack that Randall had moved beyond rational thought. The ability to reason likely lay well behind Randall in his current state. Jack would need to tread carefully in this negotiation.

  Randall nodded in return. “Good. You know, now’s a good time. Now’s a good time to look behind you.”

  Jack quickly turned ninety degrees, opening himself so he could see behind him without losing sight of Randall, frightened about what lay behind him. He now realized that he hadn’t searched the entire room as he should have when he had entered. Despite his enormous effort to remain focused, the sight of his family tied to those diving boards on the other end of the pool had sufficiently distracted him that he forgot standard procedures. Now, for the first time, he examined the back corner of the large room. Nothing scary lie there, just a stack of two empty milk crates, likely from the gym supply room, turned upside down. On top sat an envelope.

  “Go. Go ahead,” Randall instructed. “You’ll walk off-camera for a minute, but it’s OK.”

  Jack looked back at Randall, who shooed him forward with a wave of the back of his hand. Jack shuffled toward the milk crates, making sure not to turn his back on Randall. As he approached, he could see his name had been written on the front of the envelope. “Jack,” in true Randall Franklin fashion. He reached out and picked up the envelope with his left hand, still holding his Magnum in his right. He would need both hands to open the envelope, so, after a pause, he placed the gun on top of the crate. He scowled back at Randall, who shrugged. It seemed that both understood how useless that gun was at this point. Jack wouldn’t dare shoot Randall, knowing that—or at least fearful that—causing Randall to drop the controller would result in Jack’s family spilling into the water.

  He opened the envelope, which contained one page, folded into thirds. He unfolded it. A copy of a photograph occupied the majority of the page. It turned Jack’s stomach, as he suddenly learned more about his position in relation to Randall’s.

  90

  Dylan Harringer and Heath Reilly watched on the small monitor in front of them as Jack walked off-screen. They sat in the back of an FBI van in the parking lot of Chevy Chase High School, where they had pulled in minutes earlier from northern Maryland. They needed to devise a plan for entering the school and trying to save the Byrne family, but, for the last several moments, they couldn’t take their eyes from the screen.

  From their perspective Jack maintained sufficient control of the situation so far. They both got the impression that Randall wanted to talk more than anything else. He had achieved his moment in the sun, and he wanted to shine and make the most of it for as long as he could. They all knew that, as the name well implies, The Goodnight Hour lasted sixty minutes. So far Randall and Jack had taken just over half of them. As time approached the top of the hour, Harringer and Reilly feared that they may be thrust into action. For now they awaited a sign from Jack to help determine their course of action.

  Now that Jack had walked off-screen, for reasons they could not discern, Harringer and Reilly took the opportunity to begin planning. Placing SWAT officers around the perimeter of the school was their obvious first step. How to invade that swimming pool while maximizing the chances of retrieving all three Byrnes alive presented a much more difficult challenge.

  91

  The stark contrast in the expression of the two faces in the photograph stood out the most at first. On the right Randall’s face beamed. His eyes aglow and his smile flashing both rows of teeth, he looked like a nine-year old who has just heard that his family planned to vacation at Disney World. The positioning probably exaggerated this, as his face appeared much closer to the camera that the other person; Jack assumed that Randall had held the camera—likely a cell phone, judging by the photo quality—in his left hand to take this portrait.

  It took Jack several milliseconds to recognize the other person in the photo. Her normally natural beauty had washed away. Black streaks of mascara ran down each side of Melissa Hollows’ face. Even in this poor copy of the grainy photo, Jack could see the sheer terror in her eyes.

  Jack’s focus then went to the bottom center of the photo. In her hands, obviously bound at the wrists, Melissa held a book with a flowery green and yellow cover. Jack squinted to try to read the fancy script font in the lower left corner of the book: “My Journal”

  Randall had typed a message across the bottom of the page, which he had surely printed off the same computer as all of his previous messages. It read:

  THIS JOURNAL DETAILS EVENTS OF JUNE 28 AND JULY 2, 2012. IT WILL REMAIN IN A SAFE PLACE AS LONG AS WE CONTINUE TO HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING. DO NOT DEVEATE FROM OUR UNDERSTANDING, OR THIS WILL BECOME PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE.

  Jack looked up at Randall from the page in front of him. Randall smiled back at him. Not only had Randall killed several innocent people and kidnapped his family, but now he also attempted to blackmail Jack. Jack’s fury boiled, overtaking his fear for a brief second, but his sense of reason took control, trying to keep him from erupting. Randall still held all of the cards—even more cards now than Jack had previously suspected.

  Randall’s smile dissipated and he looked at Jack seriously. “You shouldn’t run for public office, Jack.”

  Jack folded the page back up and put it in his inside breast pocket. “No?”

  “No,” Randall replied. He pointed to a spot on the tile floor where Jack had previously stood. “Come on back over here.”

  Jack slowly walked back over, forgetting his gun on the milk crates. “Any reason?”

  “It doesn’t… become you, for one. And, second, you need to continue doing what you do. You do it well.” Randall paused and bent forward, the Cheshire grin coming over his face again. “But you can do it better, and I can help you.”

  “How’s that?” All of the inflection had gone out of Jack’s voice. He tried not to feel utterly defeated, but it required more and more effort with each passing moment and each demented twist that Randall threw his way.

  “You will consult with me on your cases.” Randall leaned back again. “I have an intimate understanding of the criminal mind, right? You come tell me about your cases, I will provide insight. I will be the Hannibal Lector to your Clarice Starling. Or you can be Will Graham, if that makes you feel better—more manly. Though I will say that Jodie Foster is pretty butch, so…” Randall looked for Jack
to appreciate his humor, or at least a glimpse of recognition of these Thomas Harris characters in Jack’s face, but it remained expressionless. “Will Graham was the lead in the first Hannibal Lector book, Red Dragon. Edward Norton played him in the film version, which was actually not the original. Michael Mann made an earlier version called Manhunter, with William L. Peterson in the role of Will Graham. Far superior, too. I mean, let’s face it, Michael Mann versus Brett Ratner? No contest. No one in their right mind would say Ratner could do better than Mann.”

  The phrase “no one in their right mind” resonated in Jack’s ears. How could this fucking lunatic comment on others’ judgment about anything? He was reminded briefly of something one of his partners had told him back in his days as a prosecutor: the truly insane don’t know that they are insane. Everything makes sense to them in their version of the world.

  “So, you can create any mental imagery that you want, but the bottom line is that you will use me as a consultant on your cases.” Randall paused briefly, bending forward, adding emphasis to his next question. “Do we have an understanding?”

  Ah, Jack thought, part of the blackmail agreement. I can do that. Or at least promise to do that, if it means getting Vicki and Jonah back. “Yes,” he said.

  “Great!” Randall responded. “And then, of course, you should write a book about this case. About me. Do the talk show circuit, the book signings, the lectures. The whole nine yards. The whole shebang. You can call it whatever you like, but I like the moniker Miss O’Loughlin planted: The Playground Predator. It’s got a great ring, and I think it’s caught on.

  “Tell me, Jack. Can you do that? Do we have… our understanding?”

  Jack stared at Randall Franklin, the sad, disgusting, demented creature in front of him. His mind flipped through all the details of this scenario, now that it had all been laid out before him. He tried to find options, alternatives to Franklin’s proposal. A counter-proposal, perhaps. But he couldn’t. And, if it got his family back in one piece, the items listed in Franklin’s understanding didn’t seem all that bad.

  “We can have an understanding.”

  A knowing smile slowly formed on Randall’s lips. “Good. Glad to hear it. I’d offer to share a hug, but I sense I would be rejected.”

  “You’re gonna die,” Jack droned, purposely remaining in his monotone voice. While before he couldn’t seem to muster any inflection, now he let his affect remain flat intentionally. He wanted to sound ominous.

  Randall paused, tilting his head. He didn’t seem to know how to respond.

  For the first time, Jack felt that he had sufficiently thrown Randall off of his script. He took inner pride in this small victory. “You’re going to fry. You’ll get the death penalty for this. And with this little dog and pony show you just put on TV, you just signed your own execution papers.”

  “Wow,” Randall replied, his face expressionless. “I’m disappointed, Jack.”

  “Disappointed?” Jack’s face screwed into a question mark. “Disappointed” didn’t quite match the retort he had expected.

  Randall studied Jack, with a glare of disdain. “I thought you would have grasped this better by now. I don’t care about the fucking death penalty. Look what happened to Bundy; he got more and more famous during his time on death row. He reached his height of infamy the day he died. And the trial? Forget about the trial!” Randall started beaming again, and it nauseated Jack. “My trial will blow O.J. Simpson’s out of the water. And that cunt from Florida? Casey Anthony? Nothing! She killed one little kid. No comparison.”

  Jack did not respond to this; he had nothing left to say. He just wanted—and needed—this all to be over. “Now how do I get my family back.”

  Randall thought for a moment, going back over their conversation in his head, to the extent that he could. After he felt comfortable with their understanding, he nodded. “Yes. Yes you can, thank you for asking. I think we’re about done here.”

  He pointed to the other end of the pool, to the game console behind the diving boards. “Behind the console there’s a power strip that’s plugged into an extension cord from the coaches’ office. Just turn the power strip off. That goes to the console. Without power to the console, my little controller here is useless.”

  Once again Jack looked at Randall incredulously. “That’s it? The charges won’t go off once the power supply is cut”

  “No. That’s it. Then you’ll have to arrest me, of course. And no funny business, Jack. Remember…” He pointed to the camera to his left and the other one to his right. “…The world is watching.”

  92

  Vicki opened her eyes, and Jack thought he witnessed a miracle. The paramedics had placed an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose after untying her from the diving board and pulling her back onto the dry, safe tiles. She looked dazed and confused at first, until her gaze focused on Jack’s face. She smiled weakly, then her eyes closed again heavily.

  “She’ll be more awake in the next several minutes,” a short, curly-haired female paramedic said to Jack. “Now that we’ve stopped the propofol infusion, it won’t take too long for it to wear off.”

  “Is everything else OK?” Jack asked.

  “Seems so. Good heart rate, blood pressure. Good sats.”

  Jack breathed a sigh of relief. He met the paramedic’s kind eyes. “Thank you,” he said earnestly.

  He then crawled over to Jonah, who still lay fast asleep, also with an oxygen mask over the lower half of his face. Jack looked at the baby-faced paramedic who had just connected a bag of saline to the IV in Jonah’s left arm. “How is he?”

  “Stable,” the young man said. Jack thought the EMT couldn’t be more than seventeen years old. “We need to get him on the bus and get him to a hospital.”

  Jack nodded to convey understanding. He looked back at Jonah’s sweet, innocent face. He looked so peaceful. His eyelids fluttered and he looked at Jack. “Hi, daddy,” he said weakly before he closed his eyes again. Tears began to fall down Jack’s cheeks.

  “Ok, let’s get them loaded up,” the young paramedic announced. Based on the paramedic’s age, Jack assumed that he did not have command of this group, though he thought for sure that he would receive the opposite answer if he were to ask the young paramedic himself.

  “They’re fine, aren’t they, Jack.” Randall shouted from the other end of the pool, stating it more than asking. Heath Reilly held on to the handcuffs around Randall’s wrists, pulled together behind his back, as he led Randall out of the pool. “I held up my end of the deal, Jack.”

  “Shut up,” Reilly instructed and he yanked down on the shackles, pulling Randall’s shoulders back uncomfortably.

  Just as Randall had promised earlier, the game console had shut down when Jack turned off the power strip. No booby-traps. No explosions. Randall made a deliberate gesture to the camera beside him of placing the game controller down on the bench beside him and slowly raising his hand away from it. He kept both arms aloft in a classic surrendering gesture, knowing that reinforcements would not take long to arrive.

  True to Randall’s prediction— much like almost everything over the preceding weeks— a team of officers burst into the room less than fifteen seconds later, led by Harringer and Reilly. Two pairs of paramedics followed shortly afterwards and made beelines to the diving boards and the victims that lay upon them.

  Now Jack followed the two stretchers carrying his wife and son out through the locker room and the back door, past The Rock, toward the ambulances parked nearby. The silence awaiting them outside struck Jack as odd. He hadn’t thought about it before, but, based on his experiences with a plethora of other crimes scenes, he half-expected a media swarm when they emerged from the school. But no TV cameras or flash bulbs blinded him as they emerged into the back parking lot; no paparazzi scrambled to get a photo of his family on gurneys. He assumed—incorrectly— that enough people could have viewed the entire scene from the comfort of their own homes that the reporters didn�
�t feel the need to come straight down to the scene. In fact, though the public had a front row seat to the proceedings inside that high school swimming pool, no one in the media knew which school housed the event.

  Almost no one.

  Jack stood by as the EMTs put Jonah in the back of the first ambulance; he decided to ride in the back of the second ambulance with Vicki. As the doors shut on Jonah’s, Jack looked up to walk over to the back of Vicki’s. Across the blacktop lane he saw a familiar face, flashing him a respectable, sympathetic smile, bordered by curly red hair hanging in her face. “Hi, Corinne,” Jack said.

  Corinne pushed herself forward from her position leaning against her car. “How are you doing, Jack?”

  “Been better.”

  “You were amazing in there. You did the right thing.”

  Jack nodded. He knew it would take him a long time to process the happenings of tonight, and even longer to come to judgment in his own mind about his actions.

  Corinne swung her head to the side, trying to shake some of the curls from her eyes. “I know you have so much going on, so I don’t want to be a bother… but would it be OK if I followed along to the hospital? Maybe we could talk for a few minutes if you have any down time?”

  Jack put his feet up on the running board along the back of the ambulance. “Not tonight. OK?”

  “Of course,” Corinne replied.

  Jack lowered his head as he lunged forward into the back of the ambulance. “Call me tomorrow,” he said to Corinne. The kind-faced female paramedic closed the door behind him and hopped in the front passenger seat before the ambulance pulled away.