The Finders

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  CHAPTER 6

  The kid’s name was Nicky Champine and, sure enough, the “kid” was a youngish-looking thirty-two-year-old. He lived with his grandmother in a single-story rambler in Bridgeport, up near Bubbly Creek. Night had long since fallen as I drove to his home address. Hopefully the darkness would cover what I planned on doing. Otherwise I’d be mourning Vira’s death in a jail cell. Luckily for my plan, the lane twisted and dead-ended at the Champine property, with an acre or so of crabgrass and weeds between him and the next nearest house.

  Finally, something had spun my way.

  Make that two somethings. The moon was a lightless splinter. I parked across the road from the Champine house and sat thinking about Vira. How Vira had kept me jumping, kept me occupied, and helped fill an empty spot in my heart these past ten months. And I remembered that first night as though it were yesterday. I’d set a bed up for her in the corner of what passed for my trailer home’s master bedroom. I’d been sound asleep—passed out, actually; cheap beer—when a soft whining raised me from my stupor. I stumbled about, somehow managed to pick her up, and tripped backward onto the bed. When the dust settled, I had an arm around Vira and scratched at the back of her neck with my free hand.

  “We’ll get through this,” I remember saying as I scratched her neck. “We’ll get through this, girl.”

  During Mickie’s reign, dogs had not been allowed on the bed, but after that first night, Vira claimed squatter’s rights over Mickie’s side of the bed. My collies, often Maggie and sometimes Delta, would join her. Sue could be counted on to march in, voice his displeasure at the breakdown in protocol, before retreating to his throne upon the living room couch.

  My ex says I’m an introvert, believes me to be detached and distant from contact with my fellow homo sapiens. Mickie had pointed out on more than one occasion that I got along better bonding with those of a four-legged variety.

  And I can’t argue with that.

  While Detective Hanson read me the riot act on South Michigan Street, I kept my head down and nodded at what seemed to be the appropriate moments, but my true focus lay on his desktop. Papers were splattered across the surface—case files—in a manner only the detective could decipher. However, as I sat down on Hanson’s single visitor chair I noticed a single slip of paper off to the side and away from what I assumed were the most recent Kari Jo Brockman reports. It was a driver’s license enlargement of the man Vira had attacked this morning. So as I nodded along with the detective, I focused on the driver’s license. It was difficult reading it from the reverse side of Hanson’s desk, but I made do.

  And I burned Champine’s name and address into my memory.

  * * *

  I’d brought Sue along with me, my black and tan German shepherd … my male German shepherd. I wish to this day I’d not named him Sue after the Johnny Cash song. Anyone who checked under Sue’s hood came away with the inevitable question—hey, wanker, why’d you give your dog a girl’s name? Even after hearing my Johnny Cash dissertation, they’d still stare at me as though I weren’t right in the head.

  Maybe they had a point.

  Not unlike the protagonist in Johnny’s song, Sue was our pack’s alpha male. He strutted about my trailer, chest out, exerting his dominance over the other members of the household—all of us lesser betas—as well as presenting his Old Testament–like editorials on passing cars, squirrels and rabbits, mailmen, the doorbell, and the sound of toast popping up. Quite frankly, Sue wasn’t that much of a human remains detection dog, but he scared the living piss out of any marketers that happened to stop by my trailer.

  In short, Sue was perfect for tonight’s task.

  My gut told me Vira didn’t attack Nicky Champine without cause—no way, not in this universe. I tapped Champine’s home phone number into my cell and let it ring. No answer. No flipping over to voicemail. No lights came on. No movement. Nothing. Sue and I slipped out of my F-150. Gingerly, I picked up the sledgehammer from the bed of my pickup. The two of us darted across the yard and leaned under the front window. Sue looked up at me as though I’d lost my mind, but fortunately he kept quiet.

  I called the number again. This time I could hear the ringing coming from inside the Champine house. After a dozen rings, I clicked off.

  I’d already peeked in the mailbox—junk mail from, ironically, a pizza place as well as a pre-approved credit card for Eunice Champine. And speaking of the old Champine woman, where in hell was she? It was too late for church and I doubted she worked an overnight shift. Had she finally received the news and rushed to the hospital to be by her grandson’s side? Or was she still oblivious and away somewhere? On an excursion?

  My parents were strict—definitely never-spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child types—but the running joke in the family was how much my siblings and I loved being palmed off to be spoiled by the grandparents. Didn’t matter which side, because both sides let us get away with murder.

  Would Grandma Champine let Nicky get away with murder?

  Detective Hanson was correct. I faced financial ruin, but Vira’s fate was much more imminent and I didn’t believe—not for a nanosecond—that she’d picked Nicky Champine at random out of the crowd and accosted him for no reason whatsoever.

  Moreover, the Velvet Choker Killer’s latest victim, Becky Grohl, was still missing.

  I quietly stepped up onto the stoop, rang the doorbell, and listened. Sue sat a few feet back, following the night’s proceedings like an owl scanning for mice. I rang it again, and then again, and again. Then I propped open the screen door with an elbow and rapped hard on the front door with my knuckles. I repeated this several times before I began hammering on the door with my fist. I continued pounding for a half minute and, though there was about eighty yards between the rambler and the next nearest house, at this time of night I began to fear that some of Champine’s up-the-block neighbors might come outside to check on the ruckus.

  I leaned an ear against the door. I heard no movement from inside.

  The house was dead.

  CHAPTER 7

  Time for the heavy work.

  I picked up the sledgehammer and stood before the front door like Babe Ruth in the batter’s box—at the point of no return. I needed to get inside Champine’s house with as few strikes as humanly possible, lest neighbors spill outside or cut to the chase and call the police. I took a swing—hard as I could—hitting the deadbolt full on. The door shook and swayed, but stayed in its frame. Christ, it had been loud. I wanted to grab Sue, flee for my pickup, and get the hell out of here, but instead I stood still for several minutes, staring across the property lot at Champine’s neighbor’s house, watching for any lights to pop on, for any sign of movement.

  After granting potential light sleepers a few more moments to drift back into unconsciousness, I used the hammer like a battering ram—shorter distance, less sound; more thump than thunder—smashing hard into the space between the deadbolt and the doorknob. On the second punch, the door shattered inward. I paused a long second, listened for sirens, glanced about the street for any curious passersby.

  I gripped the sledgehammer with white knuckles and, sweating from exertion mixed with fear, softly stepped into Nicky Champine’s home.

  Penlight in mouth, I carefully shut what remained of the front door—so nothing would look questionable from the street—located a nearby light switch, and flipped it on. The living room looked as though I’d traveled back to the 1970s, orange chairs with shag carpeting and brown paneling on the walls. My German shepherd swept in ahead of me, keying off my mood, growling lightly.

  Sue was ready to kick ass and take names.

  He tested the air—air scenting they call it—something dogs do as much as sniffing the ground. Fry up some bacon for breakfast any morning and you’ll catch your dog doing more than a fair amount of air scenting. When dogs sniff, they inhale scent particles into their nasal cavities, and their vast number of scent receptors enables them to identify thousands of different
smells. At that point, not unlike running a computer program, those odors are processed by their sensory cells—by their hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors as well as by that completely amazing sense of smell receptor known as the Jacobson’s organ, an olfactory chamber that allows dogs to both smell and taste at the same time.

  And when a dog like Sue follows a specific scent, his nose secretes a shallow layer of mucus that helps him capture the scent particles and, as a result, he can smell better. By licking the mucus off his nose, Sue absorbs the scent particles through his mouth. In essence, licking their nose helps dogs maximize their sense of smell. But licking also helps them clean their nose from previous smells, like humans cleansing their palate with crackers between drinks at a wine-tasting party.

  But tonight was no wine-tasting party.

  I marched across the shag, twisted past a folding table in the undersized dining room, and entered the kitchen. The cupboards held nothing of interest—plastic dishes, bowls, and cups. The fridge contained bottles of Orange Crush, the remains of a store-bought blueberry pie, and an empty bottle of mustard. The freezer was stuffed with dozens and dozens of chicken potpies and nothing else. Not even a frozen pizza. A pantry the size of a phone booth had one shelf stocked chock-full of blueberry Pop-Tarts and cans of Dinty Moore stew.

  Evidently, the Champine family wasn’t into variety. It didn’t appear the most nourishing of diets a grandmother would provide for her brood. My dogs eat healthier.

  The bathroom was green tile, both floor and walls. A lonely towel hung on a green bar. A single toothbrush sat beside the green sink, next to a tube of Colgate that looked to have been hit by a steamroller.

  The master bedroom—Grandmother Champine’s room?—was in tidy condition, that is if you discounted the thick layer of dust on the dresser top and bedside table. The dust was so thick you could write notes in it. Aside from that, the bed was neatly made, curtains pressed shut, nothing on the floor. The room didn’t look lived in, not for a long, long time, which went a long way toward explaining why the police were having such difficulty locating Eunice Champine.

  The guest bedroom was a different ball of wax, with damp towels and blankets strewn about the floor. The room contained a bunk bed and threadbare carpet—a couple more years of wear and it’d be down to the hardwood. It appeared that Champine preferred the bottom bunk. I peeked under the bed and into his closet. A jumble of T-shirts, some jeans, but nothing of interest. Same thing when I peeked into the single-car garage, sitting empty as whatever car Champine drove that day was gone. Probably abandoned at a parking lot in Avondale—walking distance from where Kari Jo Brockman had been found—when the ambulance rushed him to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center.

  That left me with what I’d been consciously avoiding … the basement.

  Sue and I headed down the hallway, back toward the kitchen. Framed photographs had been hung on both sides of the home’s thermostat and I spotted a younger-looking Nicky Champine from what appeared to be a picture taken of him for the high school yearbook. I figured Grandma Champine had been responsible for setting up this shrine. I started to look at the other pictures, but something caught my eye. There were multiple dimples—slight depressions—peppered about the Sheetrock at eye level. I turned and noticed similar bumps on the opposing wall.

  What the hell?

  Did Nicky Champine punch at the drywall on his way to and from the bathroom and bedrooms? I’m not the neatest of freaks, and none of the dents were terribly deep, but there were enough of them that I’d have picked up spackling paste at the hardware store and filled them in.

  The basement door was off the kitchen. Sue and I crept down the wooden steps; the light from overhead was dim. Even after uncounted decades, Champine’s basement remained unfinished. The odor hung thick in the air. It smelled of mold, dank and clammy, certainly in need of a dehumidifier. The main floor had been burglary-like terrifying—as in get-caught-and-do-prison terrifying—but descending the steps into the basement, feeling the drop in temperature wash over me, changed all of that. It became haunted house terrifying. I looked down at Sue. He stared back with wide eyes and a low snarl. He was not pleased to be there.

  Neither was I, but Vira’s life hung in the balance.

  I began my recon in the laundry room. A pile of clothes lay on the floor in front of a Westinghouse washer older than I am. A couple of brown and blue T-shirts hung on a makeshift clothesline. I kicked through the dirty laundry, but it looked to be only men’s underwear and jeans.

  The walkout back door contained two deadbolts—interesting—as well as a motion-detector light that kicked on when I stepped outside. It seemed out of place with the way the rest of the Champine household screamed indifference. Perhaps the light was used to scare away any neighborhood kids.

  I glanced about the backyard, but saw no storage shed or other structure.

  I shut and relocked the back door, walked over to the steps and began my ascent. Halfway up I stopped. There was something odd about the basement, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Hell, there was something odd about the house in general … and something even odder about me having broken in.

  Then I began to second-guess myself. What if I was wrong? What if Nicky Champine’s only offense was that of being an unkempt bachelor, not unlike me, just trying to eke out a living delivering pizzas and driving a bus for some local schools? What if Nicky Champine just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and my dog, for whatever insane reason, took serious umbrage at the mere sight of him? What if Detective Hanson was right? Right that I’d best forget investigating and gird my loins for the coming legal onslaught?

  Sue and I should have gotten the hell out right then, jumped in the pickup and floored it out of Bridgeport, but I decided to tempt the fates a few seconds longer. There was something I hadn’t finished and we returned to the hallway with the photographs and dimpled Sheetrock. Sure enough, there were four pictures on the left side of the thermostat that captured Nicky Champine in what must have been his freshman through senior years in high school. On the opposite side of the thermostat were four photographs of Champine’s sister, also capturing her progression through the high school years. I got a glimpse of broad, bland features and dark brown hair, but that wasn’t what caught my eye.

  What caught my eye and nearly sent me into cardiac arrest was what covered Champine’s sister’s neck in all four photographs … a black velvet choker necklace—thick and wide—exactly like the one I’d seen earlier in the day, when the policemen had pushed aside enough of the rubble to make out the figure beneath. A choker like this had been left about Kari Jo Brockman’s neck.

  It had covered her strangulation marks.

  My heart raced and I backed into the wall behind me. Then a second thing dawned on me and I lurched back toward the kitchen with Sue hot on my heels. If the basement was unfinished, why was there a wall beneath the staircase shrouded with brown paneling? Not that Champine had all that much to shove into it, but wasn’t this where you’d traditionally place a closet or create some kind of storage space?

  I took the steps down two at a time, hit the concrete floor, cut around to the side of the stairs, and rapped my knuckles along the partition of paneling, enough to realize it wasn’t adhered to anything solid, not to beams or cement. I rapped again and placed my ear against the dividing wall. I thought I heard a nearly subliminal droning, perhaps a low moan, but at this point my imagination was two exits past Panic Town.

  I stepped back, took a long breath, and swung the sledgehammer. Smashed paneling dropped to the concrete floor like eggshells; dust from thick drywall blew back on me. Several swings later I broke through, and then, like I’d done with Champine’s front door, I used the hammer as a battering ram to widen the hole. I set down the hammer and stuck in my penlight.

  The opposite wall was papered with Polaroid photographs. My blood froze. I found it impossible to catch my breath. I’d discovered the Velvet Choker Killer’s hidey
-hole. Turned out my hearing wasn’t faulty. I swung my light down toward the moaning sound. Atop a cot, a solitary figure, head-leaning-upright, a girl doing her best to fight off the effects of some kind of drug.

  “Heeelp meee…”

  I recognized her from pictures that had appeared in the newspaper and on TV. It was the missing girl.

  It was Becky Grohl.

  CHAPTER 8

  My T-shirt was quickly drenched in sweat as I worked the sledgehammer like a modern-day John Henry, smashing a hole in the wall large enough for me to squeeze through. On the inside I noticed hinges along the far corner. Champine must have rigged up some kind of hidden half-doorway to grant himself easy access. And, to make matters worse, Champine had a metal collar around Becky’s neck, which, via a half-dozen feet of chain, was tethered to a plate in the wall.

  I squeezed her forearm. “You’re safe now, Becky. Champine’s not here and he’s not going to hurt you anymore.”

  Grohl’s eyes were dull with whatever sedative he’d been using on her. She kept shaking her head as though to prove this wasn’t a dream or that her nightmare had, in fact, come to an end.

  I didn’t have bolt cutters on me so I attacked the wall plate with the hammer. This cost more time as I didn’t have much room to maneuver in this makeshift prison cell beneath the staircase. I was hunched over, didn’t have a good arc for swinging, and had to be careful not to injure the girl—not more than the hell she’d already been through—but eventually I was able to bust the metal plate free from the wall. I gripped Becky under the arms and pulled her dead weight up from the cot, into as much of a standing position as the overhead steps allowed.