Echoes of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  Satisfied that the three of us are together, one big happy family, she cuts straight to it: “I was told you need to look at some records?”

  “Yes,” Jimmy replies. “We need to see a list of patients that Dr. Marco Perez treated during his employment here. Names, addresses, as much as we can get.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Janet says with a measure of hesitation, “but you are familiar with HIPAA regulations, aren’t you? Patient records are confidential and inaccessible to law enforcement without a warrant.”

  “We’re aware. We’ve frequently had to navigate the HIPAA rules. In this case, you’ll find that we don’t need a warrant because I’m not asking for personal health information. As I’m sure you’re aware, patient information can be released to law enforcement—without a warrant—under several conditions. One of those conditions is if the information is needed to help identify or locate a suspect.”

  Jimmy settles his gaze on Janet. “That’s what I’m asking for. I’m sure you’ve seen it in the papers by now, but Congressman Perez—”

  “Congressman Perez? The one who was kidnapped?”

  “Yes … I assumed you knew him.”

  “No.” She seems shaken. “I transferred from our San Francisco clinic last year when they opened the bigger office. I knew that he once worked for us, but when you mentioned Perez, I didn’t put two and two together. We have several employees with that last name.”

  “I imagine you understand why I want to look at his patient records.”

  “Y-yes! No! You think one of his patients is responsible for his disappearance?”

  “Just looking at all possibilities,” Jimmy says evasively.

  * * *

  It takes Janet about twenty minutes, but she eventually emerges from a side office carrying a small ream of paper.

  “I printed out every patient he counseled and treated during his time with us. It’s a lot of names, I’m afraid. You said basic information, so I ordered it by name, birthday, and address. I hope that works.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  Grabbing a small table in the corner of the waiting room, we pull up three chairs and divide the stack into three. None of us have any idea what we’re looking for. Well, maybe Jimmy does, but I’m in the dark, and Ross is rubbing his belly, so I’m guessing he’s in the dark as well.

  It’s not like the patient’s name is going to have an asterisk next to it and a footnote that says KILLER or SON OF KILLER, right? Still, Jimmy wants to take a quick look before we scan the document into a PDF and email it off to Diane … the only person who might be able to make sense of it.

  Sometimes I’m wrong.…

  When Jimmy sits erect in his seat, no longer slouching over his coffee, the move is so sudden and willful that both Ross and I look up.

  “I think I have it.” Jimmy’s voice is filled with wonder.

  We’re barely two minutes into our perusal and he thinks he’s figured it out. I’m about to tell him to stop teasing when I see his face.

  Damned if he isn’t serious.

  “How could you possibly know from a list?”

  Ross nods his dubious agreement.

  Pulling a page from the stack, Jimmy circles something on it and then turns it around to face us. He places it on the table and slowly pushes it across. The only obvious mark on the page is the circle he just drew around the name Dorothy Smit.

  I still don’t get it.

  Growing impatient, Jimmy reaches across the table.

  Instead of pointing at Dorothy’s name, he points farther to the right. My eyes follow, and I still don’t understand—until the truth of it hits me full in the face. The ugly truth. The bastard has been taunting us every step of the way. As I digest the words before me, a chill walks slowly up my spine, like electricity sparking its way up a Jacob’s ladder.

  “I think you have it.” My mind reels from the discovery. Pushing the page toward Ross, I spare him the intrigue and immediately point to the address, tapping it lightly with my index finger.

  Ross is beside himself. “Holy … are you serious? The house where we found Noah?”

  “Tuttle Street,” I say.

  “The same,” Jimmy replies.

  We stare at each other in disbelief for the better part of a minute, processing and trying to come to grips with the enormity of the discovery.

  In the end, it’s Ross who asks the most relevant question—the only question.

  “Who’s Dorothy Smit?”

  34

  Some people just know they’re going to die of cancer.

  Some are right.

  For Dorothy Smit, it was a given. She’d smoked for forty-five of her fifty-nine years. A lifetime of tar and nicotine, the last half of which was filled with endless media and internet reports of people who did this or did that and got cancer. Cigarettes were always high on the list of culprits.

  How else was it supposed to end?

  Diagnosed in 2009, Dorothy fought the good fight for years.

  The first surgery was followed by chemotherapy and some limited radiation treatment. Things looked promising for a while, for years, even. Her scans looked good, she finally gave up the cigarettes, and she even started to breathe with more ease, as if the tar pit in her chest was finally loosening its grip on her shriveled and malformed lungs, relenting to the pressure of clean air and clean living.

  She had a good run: three years.

  The second diagnosis must have hit her particularly hard.

  It was so unfair. She’d beaten it once, hadn’t she? And after all the progress she’d made, giving up the cigarettes, going for walks, eating healthier meals. For what, an even more aggressive cancer?

  Again, there was surgery and chemo and radiation. Her body was cut and poisoned and blasted by invisible rays, and still, cancer marched through her system like a Roman legion, polluting the lymph nodes and reaching its ugly tentacles into her organs, tainting them, corrupting them.

  When Dorothy Smit finally died, a mere husk of the woman she’d once been, she was mourned by her sister, her third husband, a niece, and three or four friends. That was it. Some who knew her but couldn’t attend the funeral for one reason or another (depending on what kind of excuse they could come up with) would later post a kind word or a remembrance on Facebook.

  It was the type of rote gesture expected in polite society, something to make people feel good about themselves while the voice in their head reminded them they didn’t like the old bat in the first place. Not at all.

  Dorothy had been a bit of a cancer herself.

  It was a sad way to end a life—any life. So much potential squandered. In the end, not a single person signed the registry at her wake except her husband, the immeasurably meek Henry Smit, who died himself just two years later.

  Dorothy’s sons were conspicuously absent.

  Both had good reasons, one more so than the other, and those few who took time to gather in her memory whispered of those reasons. Whispered. As if Dorothy’s corpse might arise from its coffin and admonish them if she heard a single bad word about her boys.

  She loved those boys.

  She hated those boys.

  And she did both with all her heart.

  It was in this purgatory of her own making that she died. And when it was finally done, and the pain of the disease had passed into another dimension, it would be nice to think that somewhere in the world, perhaps, a single blade of grass might have stirred quietly at her passing, recognizing her departing soul, acknowledging that she once lived.

  But if this was so, no one took note. Not even the blade of grass.

  35

  We’re back at Starbucks.

  It occurs to me that for someone who doesn’t like the taste of coffee, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. I have my usual: a Venti mocha, single shot, decaf, with 1 percent milk and no whip. I figure if you can’t avoid the coffee, you can at least smother it in milk and chocolate.

  The hunt f
or Marco Perez has taken a decidedly positive turn, but with answers practically throwing themselves at us, an equal number of questions seem to manifest, each begging for attention.

  I feel the pressure of time more keenly than at any other point since we started this case. Real pressure, like a clock tick-tick-ticking in the back of my brain. How much longer does Marco have—really? We’re lucky he’s not dead already. Any grace we have left must certainly have expired, and now that the answer seems to be in sight—just beyond our grasping minds—I have to wonder: How many hours do we have left? How many minutes?

  And what do we tell Ella if we fail?

  The six interrogatives of any good investigation are who, what, where, when, why, and how, the most important of these being who. Once the who is determined, the rest often follows. Regarding the disappearance of the four men, where the who was such an insurmountable question mark, we now have an answer.

  Now we just need to find him … and Marco.

  * * *

  “That was Diane,” Jimmy says, returning to the table after a lengthily huddle with his phone in the corner of the room. “She’s still digging, but it looks like Dorothy Smit had two sons that were always in trouble with the law. The oldest, Michael Graves Jr., was shot and killed during a botched robbery in 1998. He stabbed a store clerk in the neck with an eight-inch drill bit and then tried to ambush the arriving officers. He lost.”

  “Don’t bring a drill bit to a gunfight,” I mutter.

  Jimmy cocks his head in agreement. “Safe to say we can cross him off our suspect list.”

  “Safe to say,” Ross replies. “What about the other son?”

  “Angus Graves.” Jimmy slides his phone across the table so the detective can view the latest in a series of mug shots. “Diane downloaded that from JBRS, but I imagine you have access to a much larger assortment of booking photos. The guy’s been arrested twenty-seven times. Just finished a six-year stretch at Ironwood State Prison for robbery and assault after a drug deal went sideways. He was released eleven months ago.”

  “Ironwood,” Ross says. “Yeah, that’s about three hundred miles southeast of here, not far from the border with Arizona. I’ve had to make the drive a few times to interview suspects.” He shakes his head. “Not a fun drive.”

  “Maybe you should call Kip,” I say to Jimmy.

  “We don’t know this is our guy yet.”

  “Yeah, but they’re wasting his time having him chase down Abel Moya.”

  “Let’s just see what we can confirm before we jump the gun.”

  Jimmy can tell I’m not happy and tries to give me a reassuring smile. If I were Kip, I’d be pissed at being ordered to pursue leads that I know are irrelevant, especially with a congressman’s life on the line.

  Jimmy says I have a touch of oppositional defiance disorder because I don’t like clueless, micromanaging bureaucrats.

  Like that’s a problem.

  * * *

  Setting up his MDT, or mobile data terminal, Ross uses his AirCard to access Bakersfield PD’s secure database. His stubby fingers peck away at the keyboard with surprising agility, and a moment later he mutters, “Uh-huh.” A comment that seems meant for his own gratification because he doesn’t elaborate. More keystrokes follow, along with a hmm and another uh-huh as his fingers continue to putter.

  Finally satisfied, he pushes back from the terminal and adjusts the screen so he can see it better from his new position.

  “There’s a lot here,” he mutters. Then, almost apologetically, he asks, “Can I have our records department forward a bunch of reports to Diane? See what she can do with them?” He pauses. “We’ve got people, but between Marco’s disappearance, the murders of Jason and Wade, and the rescue of Noah—”

  Jimmy holds up a hand. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “It’s just … maybe Diane can hit all this with fresh eyes, especially since we now have a suspect.”

  “Anything specific you want her to look at?”

  “No. That’s the problem. It’s not just one thing but a whole bunch of things. Angus Graves is thirty-nine and he’s been offending since he was eight. Our database displays fifteen one-line record entries per page, and I’ve got thirteen pages of contacts on him. A bunch of the early entries are runaway reports, juvenile problems, stuff like that, but there’s also an assault when he was eleven, burglaries and car prowls when he was twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, attempted suicide when he was fifteen, and the hits just keep coming.”

  “Do you have narratives with all the reports or just the basics? The dates, times, places, and people?”

  “I’m guessing it’s probably going to be about fifty-fifty. The real meat is in the narrative, I know, but these records go back thirty years, so … I just don’t know.”

  Jimmy scribbles an email address on a Post-it note and pushes it across the table. “Have them send it here. I’ll text Diane and let her know it’s coming.”

  “Tell her I’m sorry to dump on her like that.”

  “Are you kidding?” I turn to Ross. “She’ll be ecstatic. She’s freaky that way.”

  As the detective notifies his Records Department about the substantial records request, and Jimmy shoots off a text to Diane, I drag two chairs around and place them on either side of Ross, claiming one for myself and leaving the other for my partner.

  With the email and text sent, we get down to the business of scrubbing the database. The very first record, as Ross said, is from over thirty years ago. Little Angus Graves, it seems, had gotten angry at a neighbor boy who took his bike. And what does the average boy do when someone takes his bike? Well, he hits the kid over the head with a baseball bat, of course.

  Just once, though.

  Little Tommy from two houses down had a concussion and the desperate need for eight stitches. He never touched Angus’s bike again.

  That was the beginning of a criminal life that established Angus as a bona fide frequent flier, an outlaw so prolific in his criminality that he should get bonus miles for every night he stays at the county jail or state pen. Double miles when physical injury is involved.

  We spend the next twenty minutes perusing the reports chronologically, eventually reaching one labeled ATTMPT SUIC, cop shorthand for an attempted suicide.

  “Fifteen years old and he’s trying to kill himself.” Ross shakes his head. “How much do you have to think the world sucks to even contemplate such a thing?”

  “Hard to tell when it comes to suicide,” Jimmy says. “Could have been a cry for help or a bad trip on whatever drugs he kept getting arrested for. Things tend to snowball when you make bad choices.”

  “Where was this?”

  “It says Ranch Hill Road, out in the foothills northeast of Bakersfield. There are some good hiking trails in that area, but not much else. Well, except for the old silver mine. Kind of a ghost town, if you ask me. Most of the old buildings are still standing, and it’s been used for one thing or another through the years. Abandoned these days, last I heard.”

  “Seems an odd place to commit suicide,” I say, having seen my fair share.

  “Maybe his family was camping in the area?”

  “I suppose. Does it say how he tried to kill himself?”

  Ross scans the five paragraphs that constitute the report. “Hanging.” A thought seems to occur to him. “That might account for the scar.”

  Jimmy perks up. “What scar?”

  Ross makes a swiping motion across his neck. “The ‘Scars-Marks-Tattoos’ section indicates he has a burn scar around the front and sides of his neck. A good hanging attempt will do that.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a cry for help.”

  “No, that takes commitment,” Ross agrees.

  Continuing through the myriad reports, we find that Angus’s crimes seem to have taken on a more sinister tone after the failed suicide attempt, as if, failing with the rope, he intended to get the job done by other means, mainly through dangerous deeds with dangerou
s people. By the time he turned seventeen, he was the main enforcer for a local drug dealer. And when Angus came around, people always paid.

  One way or another.

  Three weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Angus was finally booked into the county jail for the first time. It was a far cry from juvenile detention, but at six foot three and almost three hundred pounds of mostly muscle, Angus was a force to be reckoned with. His juvenile career had been impressive, no doubt. It included convictions for burglary, car prowl, rape, assault, robbery, drugs, and more. But that was just the warm-up act.

  Angus Graves had finally come into his own. Some might say it was a bit like Lucifer finding hell and taking his throne. Others would forgo the simile and say it was Lucifer—the devil himself—in all his three hundred pounds of menace and malice.

  Noah called him a demon; he wasn’t far from the mark.

  * * *

  After viewing all the local records, Ross logs into NCIC—the FBI’s National Crime Information Center—and pulls a Triple-I on Angus. The Triple-I is just one of many features of NCIC and is similar to the return from a local law enforcement database, but with a wider reach. It doesn’t record every contact with Angus, but it does include all of his arrests, whether in Bakersfield, California, or Bakersfield, Vermont, as well as any warrants, restraining orders, missing person reports, and other information that might be relevant. It’s the bread and butter of law enforcement, and cops all across the country run millions of queries a day.

  “As you said, he was released from Ironwood State Prison eleven months ago and is currently on supervision.” Ross points to a notation on the screen. Picking up his pen, he writes down the phone number for Angus’s community corrections officer, or CCO, then reads her name aloud: Crystal Baum-something.

  He puts the phone on speaker and dials the number.